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THE 



HOVELS OF IRELAND. 



BY 



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COPT RIGHT, 

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By Thomas Kelly. 



THE LIBRARY 
OF CONGRESS 



PREFACE. 



" Property is made for man, and not man for property." 

It is on this axiom that we base our present movement, which 
is directed — not against property or its rights — but against the 
abuse of those rights. 

When Madame Roland said, as, passing to her doom, she 
looked up at the statue of Liberty, "Oh, Liberty, how many 
crimes have been committed in thy name ! " it was not because 
she loved or revered liberty the less ; it was against the abuses 
perpetrated under its ensign that she protested. So now do we 
protest against the system which has turned an institution that 
was founded for the Avell-being of the greater number, and of the 
most industrious classes, into a mere instrument for the benefit 
of the smallest number and of the idlest class in society. 

The idea that property is so sacred a thing in itself that its 
rights must not be infringed. upon, even to prevent the decay and 
death of a nation, is not an idea that is to be found in law, or in 
jurisprudence, or in political economy, or in ethics, or in the 
Bible. The precise contrary of this idea is inculcated in all the 
leading works of political economy, from Adam Smith up, and 
also by the principal writers on law and jurisprudence. I need 
not say anything about the Bible, for one of the most notorious 
outcries of the freethinkers of the present day against the teach- 
ings of the Gospel is, that they are rank communism, and that 
our Lord was utterly ignorant of political economy in all its 
branches. 

The idea therefore of the divine rights of property has had its 
growth, not amongst educated minds, but amongst what I must 
call, for want of a better term, the "uneducated section" of the 
upper classes. These are some of them property holders. Some 



11 PREFACE. 

of them own no property except debts ; but both kinds are alike 
ignorant. They have heard from babyhood up that the world 
exists but for them and the rest of fashionable society. They 
have heard that all the outside world is "rabble." If they 
possess property, they believe it is their own innate superiority 
that has placed it in their hands. If they don't possess it, why, 
they believe they will soon get it by a rich marriage, or by some 
lucky haul in Wall street, or by some legacy from an apoplectic 
uncle. In any case, property, once theirs, brings no duties with 
it, and may be used as seemeth good unto their eyes. 

When I say that this section of the upper classes is uneducated 
and ignorant, I do not mean to say that they do not know how 
to read or write, or that they have not, once upon a time, learned 
enough about history to know that there was once a man named 
George Washington, who ruined the country by separating it 
from England ; but I mean that their minds are wholly unde- 
veloped, that their powers of reasoning are in an embryo condi- 
tion, that they have never had any intellectual training, and that 
they worship one God, and that God is their Class. Gentlemen 
and cads is their division of the world. For the million or so of 
" gentlemen," everything. For the fifty millions of cads, nothing. 
Such persons are always very rampant in opposition to all reforms. 
Their influence, however, is limited to a certain portion of the 
press, and to a portion of fashionable society. It is upheld for a 
time by the vaporings of the mighty army of toadies, who sur- 
round the charmed inclosure of high life, and leave no stone un- 
turned to gain ever so slight a footing therein. In England, 
when a man has retired from some plebeian occupation, his first 
care is to get a hanging-on-place on the outer rail of high society. 
To do this he joins the Tories, and becomes more Tory than the 
Tories themselves. We see precisely the same thing under changed 
conditions here. A few ignorant or selfish persons belonging to 
the ' ' upper crust," a few newspapers who are the toadies of these 
persons, and a great number of would-be aristocrats — such is the 
poor material of which the opposition to reforms in favor of the 
masses is usually composed. From such antagonists we have 
nothing to fear. 



PREFACE. Ill 

We hold that there is no such thing as absolute property in 
land. Many people go farther, and say that there is no such thing 
as property in land at all — that land cannot be bought and sold, 
because no man has a right to anything in it except what he pro- 
duces. Obviously, if we adopted this theory, we should not 
hold that landlords should be compensated for their land, nor 
that it should be made as easy to buy and sell a piece of land as 
if it were a bale of cotton, nor that a farmer's proprietary should 
be established. We do, however, uphold these things, because 
we think they are the only practical notions for our present state 
of society, because the adoption of the communal system of land, 
whether it be in itself good or bad, could not be accomplished 
without the most tremendous revolution that has ever taken place 
in the world, and because, leaving opinions aside, a farmer's pro- 
prietary has been found to work well — quite well enough for any 
country — and we think it is a good thing to leave well alone. I 
would suggest in connection with this that the Prussian system 
of issuing bonds to the landlords would be far better than paying 
them in cash, and that of course the credit of the English gov- 
ernment being so good, it ought not to be necessary for the Irish 
peasant to pay nearly as much interest as the German peasant was 
obliged to do. 

Ohas. Stewart Parkell* 



The Hovels of Ireland 



" Upon the question, What is the worst bread which is eaten? one an- 
swered, in the respect of the coarseness thereof, bread made of beans. 
Another said, bread made of acorns. But the third hit the truth and said, 
oread taken out of other men's mouths, who are the proprietors thereof." 

It is a fact well known to everybody that for many 
years great misery lias existed in a chronic form amongst 
the agricultural classes of Ireland. The laborer has been 
but ahair's-breadth better off than the pig he feeds on 
the refuse he himself finds it impossible to eat, and the 
farmer has been but a hair' s-breadth better off than the 
laborer he employs. Hopeless, voiceless poverty, whose 
only care has been to save by every imaginable kind of 
stinting a few pennies to educate the children of the 
hovel, and to contribute to the support of the peasant's 
only consolation — his religion — has been the lot for gen- 
erations upon generations of the great mass of Ireland's 
population. 

Until lately, however, this poverty, frightful as it is, 
has excited but little sympathy even amongst the most 
liberal nations, and amongst the people that rule Ireland, 
and are consequently responsible for her condition, it 
has met chiefly with contemptuous sneers, and the asser- 
tion, repeated so often and so loudly that England has 
induced almost every other country under the sun to 
believe it, that the whole root of the evil lay in the Irish 
character, in the natural inferiority of the Celt to the 
Anglo-Saxon, in the utter incapacity for progress, and 

3 



4 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

the hopeless inability to help themselves, improve them- 
selves, or govern themselves, inherent in this unfortunate 
race. 

Now it is an unhappy fact in human nature, that if 
any individual or people, who by a combination of cer- 
tain qualities of hardness, toughness, selfishness, and 
thorough unscrupu]ousness, has achieved showy material 
successes, only insists positively enough, and blatantly 
enough, that the sky is black and not blue, and that the 
sun is the source of darkness and not of light, presently, 
one by one, every other individual or people begins to 
think that there must be something in it, or such a suc- 
cessful, and consequently superior, individual or people 
would not proclaim it so incessantly ; and the calumni- 
ated sky and sun having only facts in their favor, and 
those counting for little against assertions when made by 
certain distinguished beings, it will soon become an arti- 
cle of universal belief that the sky is black, and that the 
sun does not give light, and a black cloud passing across 
the sky, or a spot in the sun, will be pointed to as incon- 
testable proofs of the theory. 

Of similar nature has been the immeasurable twaddle 
talked about the causes of Irish poverty, the nature of 
the Irish character, the radical difference between Celt 
and Saxon — no doubt existing, but a difference of kind 
and not of degree — and finally the ineradicable tenden- 
cies of the Irish to crime and pauperism. In this en- 
lightened country, where, however, the majority of the 
inhabitants are Anglo-Saxons, and therefore think and 
judge as Anglo-Saxons do, I have, with a few honorable 
exceptions, as from the lips of a man like Wendell 
Phillips, seldom heard an opinion expressed upon the 
condition of Ireland which could lead me to hope that a 
glimmer of the truth had entered the mind of the speaker ; 
while in some cases, I regret to say, the opinion was con- 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. & 

veyed in such language as showed that the speaker, from 
the prejudices of education, or perhaps from religious 
bigotry, did not even wish to know the real state of 
affairs, for fear of some of his pet theories on the subject 
of race or religion being thereby disturbed. But theories, 
instilled in our childhood by pastors and masters, have 
ever been, and ever will be, one of the great stumbling- 
blocks to progress, both individual and national. To 
many a man it would be like tearing body and soul asun- 
der to force him to give up some fallacy, loved "not 
wisely, but too well," which, like the poison plant in Haw- 
thorne's wonderful tale, has grown with his growth and 
strengthened with his strength, till his whole being is im- 
pregnated with its poison, and he feels that he can no longer 
live without the companion that is cramping to his intel- 
lect and deadly to his sympathies. The influence of such 
a bosom upas-plant America has seen on a gigantic scale 
when many of her best and greatest men arrayed them- 
selves in favor of slavery — when in the heart of Boston, 
the most liberal city in the world, Wendell Phillips was 
mobbed, and William Lloyd Garrison compelled to fly 
for his life from an aristocratic rabble headed by Edward 
Everett. An almost equally virulent influence is seen now 
at work, when many good people are wishing the evil 
days of Grantism back again, eager to see the sorely pun- 
ished South crushed down once more under the slavery of 
military force and carpet-bagism. Mr. Herbert Spencer 
has well illustrated the fatal effects of all the various 
4 'biases" we cherish and nourish, in his study of soci- 
ology, and he shows the root of all true liberal-minded- 
ness in his "Illustrations of Universal Progress," when 
he pens these ever-memorable words: " To the true 
reformer no institution is sacred, no belief above criti- 
cism. Everything shall conform itself to equity and 
reason. Nothing shall be saved by its prestige." Any 



6 THE HOVELS OF IEELAOT). 

liberalism that professes less than this is spurious. You 
can no more have a " moderate" liberal than you can 
have a moderately honest man or a moderately virtuous 
woman. 

But, unhappily, it is in contest with this very moder- 
ate liberalism, or " conservative liberalism," as it loves 
to call itself, meaning thereby conservative of certain 
favorite lies, that the heart of the single-eyed truth-seeker 
grows sore. One timid soldier that is with us does more 
harm in demoralizing the courageous and creating con- 
fusion in the ranks than fifty enemies in front of us on 
the field. Justin McCarthy tells us, in his " History of 
our Own Times," how much of the difficulty in the way 
of the Anti-Corn-Law men came from their Whig friends 
who wanted to be moderate. He tells us how Mr. 
Macaulay, who professed to think with Bright and 
Cobden, and who did really think with them as soon as 
it became evident that their cause was going to be suc- 
cessful, wrote to his constituents thus : "In my opinion 
you are all wrong — not because you think all protection 
bad, for I think so too ; not even because you avow your 
opinion and attempt to propagate it, for I have always 
done the same, and shall do the same ; but because, being 
in a situation where your only hope is in a compromise, 
you refuse to hear of compromise ; because, being in a situ- 
ation where every person who will go a step with you on the 
right road ought to be cordially welcomed, you drive from 
you those who are willing and desirous to go with you half 
way. To this policy I will be no party." So, too, during 
the long and hope-sickening struggle for Catholic Eman- 
cipation in Ireland, who were the people that contributed 
most to thwart the efforts and damp the ardor of the 
brave and true reformers \ Who but the half-a-loaf-is- 
better-than-no-bread men, the men of compromise, the 
men of moderation % Had these had their weak-minded 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 7 

way, Ireland might still be writhing with one arm caught 
in the cleft of Catholic Disabilities, a prey to the twin 
wolves of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Irish greed, as she was 
before the days of O'Connell. Space would fail me if I 
were to point out one-thousandth part of the instances, of 
which history is full, of the evils of an inopportune spirit 
of compromise when great rights are at stake ; but any 
one who has been a foe to slavery in the days when it 
was rampant, will remember how abortive all efforts at 
compromise were, on that question, between North and 
South, and how each feeble attempt only opened the way 
yet wider for the disaster in the midst of which the seem- 
ingly irremovable iniquity was finally swept from the 
face of the earth. 

Coming back to the particular wrongs of which I wish 
to speak — first, the wrong of English rule, as it exists in 
Ireland ; secondly, the wrong of landlord rule, as it ex- 
ists in Ireland — I have found, as far as my own experience 
goes, that the most insidious and most discouraging 
opponents I have had to deal with in argument in this 
country have been those who have begun by announcing 
themselves as holders of liberal views on all subjects, but 
at the same time as standing on a higher plane than 
flighty Radicals like John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spen- 
cer. John Bright, in their secret opinion, though it may 
be an opinion of which they themselves are only dimly 
conscious, has atoned for being a Radical by having been 
once a member of the English cabinet. M. Gambetta 
finds his justification for his democratic career in the fact 
that he is now President of the Chamber of Deputies, 
and will one day probably be President of France, and 
also partly in the fact that he makes war against the 
Jesuits — action which always finds favor in the eyes of 
the class of Liberals of whom I speak, who are generally 
Protestants first, and Christians afterwards. But what 



8 THE HOVELS OF IKELAND. 

is there to be said for the striving, fighting soldier in the 
ranks of the present day, the Radical who has not yet 
been successful, who has nothing but scars for the past, 
wounds and bruises for the present, vague hopes for the 
future to show — no decorations, nor badges, nor trophies 1 
the man whose birth perhaps is low, whose family no- 
where, who has to earn his living in the few hours of 
leisure he can snatch from his labors for reform 1 Fie 
on the Plebeian, with his provincial dialect, or his Scotch 
or Irish brogue ! What terrible things are not whispered 
about him ? That he once worked as a mechanic, or per- 
haps even as a day-laborer ! Does the world of fashion 
receive him ? Do the gentry and aristocracy support his 
principles % ~No ; then let him by all means be suppressed 
as quickly as possible ; he is a danger to society. I re- 
member well the time when no respectable person dared 
so much as mention the name of Gambetta in a respecta- 
ble French salon. To mention it with any approach to 
praising or defending him would have entailed social 
ostracism. When Joseph Arch, the land reformer, began 
his agitation in England, bishops and squires vied with 
each other in writing to the newspapers, suggesting sum- 
mary modes of punishment to be inflicted on this danger- 
ous fellow, such as duckings in horse-ponds, and so forth. 
O'Connell and John Bright, in the days of the Anti-Corn- 
Law agitation, shared between them every epithet of op- 
probrium that liberal and conservative newspapers alike 
could find to hurl at their heads. So nowadays the land 
reformers who head the present agitation in Ireland are 
denounced as endeavoring to excite an agrarian rebellion, 
because one or two fools, in a crow T d of twenty thousand 
farmers, cry out for shooting landlords. So the same 
old story is ever repeated ; the same abusive language 
is showered on the head of every leader of every new re- 
form ; the same combination of stolid conservatives, timid 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 9 

liberalists and Laodicean " moderates," who like to be 
called reformers, but do not want to do anything or risk 
anything in support of their professed principles, is formed 
from age to age against the small phalanx of single-minded 
men, enthusiasts if you will, who have accomplished 
everything with any good in it, ever since the world be- 
gan. Only a few weeks ago a gentleman, a lawyer of in- 
telligence, said to me, apropos of the land question in 
Ireland: "Are any of your family land-owners?" I 
replied in the affirmative. "Then," he said, with an air 
of astonishment, not to say suspicion, " why do you and 
your family support the radical view of the land ques- 
tion ? " I said — the only thing I could say — "Because 
we respect the laws of justice, and feel that it will be 
better for us in the end to follow them, though it may 
apparently be to our disadvantage now." The look of 
astonishment on his face deepened, and I said no more ; 
but I might have answered him in the words of Monta- 
lembert in his "Monks of the West," "We are often 
asked what is the disposition upon which every guaranty 
of order, of security, and of independence invented by 
political wisdom is founded ? What is the virtue, with- 
out which all these guaranties are ridiculous ? It is, un- 
doubtedly, that moral energy which inspires men with 
the ability and the desire to oppose themselves to injus- 
tice, to protest against the abuse of power, even when 
this injustice and this abuse do not directly affect them- 
selves." In America it is too often the case that it can- 
not be understood why a man should support a principle 
or advocate a reform based on abstract justice, unless he 
has himself an " axe to grind." 

The above is only one specimen amongst many of the 
species of minds in which the reformer meets his worst 
foes — minds unable to conceive of any motives higher 
than those of self-interest in some shape or other. They 



10 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

doubt either the sincerity or the common-sense of any 
one professing to be guided by disinterested considera- 
tions. " A man," said an acquaintance to me the other 
day, in allusion to one of our Irish members of Parlia- 
ment, who spends his money freely for the Nationalist 
cause, 4 ' a man who spends one-fifth of his income on 
himself, and the other four-fifths on an idea, is a lunatic, 
and should be put in an asylum." Happily for the 
world there have been, from time to time, people in it who 
were not of this gentleman's way of thinking, or we 
should still be savages burrowing each one in his own 
hole in the ground, and sallying forth each one only to 
club his neighbor, who might be trying to secure the 
biggest fruit on the tree, or the most succulent roots in 
the earth ; but such principles, relics of our days of 
naked barbarism, yet survive under the respectable names 
of ' ' practical sense, " " every-day wisdom, ' ' and so forth, 
in the minds of myriads of estimable people. 

To return to my subject, however, it has been a matter 
of continual amazement to me to see how, on coming 
down to the concrete in Irish questions, the most puerile 
objections are invariably urged against arguments that 
have stood the brunt of thousands of years — ever since 
man had a history, in fact— and the most childish ques- 
tions are asked, showing the densest ignorance, not only 
of Irish and English history, but of all history, by per- 
sons setting themselves up as judges on all points of con- 
flict between England and Ireland, and delivering them- 
selves of those questions with the air of having forever 
silenced their opponents thereby. One of the most ster- 
eotyped questions, the inevitable question, in fact, sup- 
posed to be unanswerable, is, " Why should not Ireland 
be as content to remain united with England as Scotland 
is ?" This question needs only a perusal of the leading 
facts of Irish history for its answer. It is about as rea- 



THE HOVELS OF IBELAND. 11 

sonable a question as if one were to ask, " Since a black 
cat and a tabby cat can get on very well together, why 
should not a cat and mouse ?" It is not the aim of this 
pam}3hlet, however, to answer the question. Any one 
who takes the trouble to study the impartial pages of 
Lecky, in his " England in the Eighteenth Century,'' can 
find out for himself all the reasons for Scotland's con- 
tentedness and Ireland's discontentedness ; but there is 
another stereotyped interrogatory, with which I propose 
to occupy myself now, and that one runs thus : " How is 
it that the farmers of Ireland are so miserable, while the 
farmers of England, with precisely the same system of 
land tenure, are so prosperous?" The equally stereo- 
typed answer which the propounders of this question 
make to themselves, and one which no amount of reason- 
ing or proof will drive out of their Protestant and Anglo- 
Saxon heads, is, "Because the Irish farmers are Celts 
and Roman Catholics, and therefore have all the vices ; 
and the English farmers are Anglo-Saxons and Protes- 
tants, and therefore have all the virtues." 

The stern logic of recent events has now in a great meas- 
ure answered this question, as history always answers 
every question if it is only given time enough. It has 
answered it, too, in a very different manner from what the 
above-mentioned reasoners would have expected. Dis- 
tress has spread to England. The agricultural laborers 
have become paupers ; the farmers are fast becoming so 
too. Many have given up their farms, unable to make a 
living off them ; many have left the country to seek their 
fortunes elsewhere. Everywhere the standard of comfort 
has been lowered, till it threatens to approach that of the 
Irish peasant, and an emigration movement is on foot 
which may assume gigantic proportions during the next 
few years. A little competition from owners of free land, 
a couple of poor harvests, and the English land system 



12 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

has toppled over, and threatens to overwhelm country 
gentry, farmers, and laborers alike in its ruins. We 
have seen only the beginning of agricultural distress in 
England ; as the farmers have been the last to feel the 
pressure of hard times, so they will be the last to recover ; 
and while good harvests may operate as a check on the 
advancing distress, they will only operate as a drag does 
on a carriage going down hill. The bottom of the hill will 
be assuredly reached at last, and the future of the Eng- 
lish farmer, and therefore of England itself, will then 
depend upon whether the English gentry, like their pro- 
totypes, the French Legitimists, will still remain unable 
to learn anything or to forget anything, or whether some 
new John Bright or Richard Cobden will be able to 
squeeze from their necessities what their sense of justice 
would never have yielded. It is amusing, or would be 
so, were it not for the frightful suffering entailed on the 
poor by such selfish blunders on the part of the legis- 
lating classes, to hear how the voices of the landed pro- 
prietors are being gradually raised again for protection, 
under the thin disguise of reciprocity. " Starve the peo- 
ple, but keep our pockets filled," is their cry, and such 
has been the cry of a landed aristocracy in every age and 
every part of the world, with everywhere the same re- 
sults. Crime, fever, famine, degradation almost to the 
level of beasts, for the victims, the toiling masses, — then, 
when time was ripe, revolution, bloodshed, and destruc- 
tion for the oppressors — they who had sowed the wind 
reaping the whirlwind at last, — and this I will ask, when 
Nemesis strikes, who shall blame overmuch the tools she 
uses, whether they be Bohemian peasants, or French 
Jacobins, or German Communists, or Russian Nihilists, or 
Irish Ribbonmen, or English Chartists ? The last friend 
of the people is Sansculottism, the avenger. " Where- 
fore," says Carlyle, "let all men know what of depth 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 13 

and of height is still revealed in man ; and, with fear and 
wonder, with just sympathy and just antipathy, with 
clear eye and open heart, contemplate it and appropriate 
it ; and draw innumerable inferences from it. This infer- 
ence, for example, among the first : That, ' if the gods of 
this lower world will sit on their glittering thrones, indo- 
lent as Epicurus' gods, with the living chaos of igno- 
rance and hunger weltering uncared-for at their feet, and 
smooth parasites preaching, peace, peace, when there is 
no peace,' then the dark chaos, it would seem, will rise 
— has risen — and O Heavens ! has it not tanned their 
skins into breeches for itself ? That there be no second 
Sansculottism in our earth for a thousand years, let us 
understand well what the first was ; and let rich and poor 
of us go and do otherwise." 

It is not my intention here to dilate on English poverty 
and its consequences ; what I wish to draw attention to, in 
speaking of the condition into which England is falling, 
is simply the fact that only since the English farmers be- 
gan to lift up their voices and form tenant-right leagues, 
with, as yet, far less cause for doing so than the Irish 
farmers have had for two hundred years, has the world 
in general begun to admit the folly of the British land 
system, and tardily to acknowledge that character alone 
will not make a man rich and thriving, unless the laws 
of his land are such as leave him free to employ his facul- 
ties to the best advantage, and moreover secure to him 
the enjoyment of his profits after he has earned them. 
The land-laws have never done this either in England or 
in Ireland ; but the reason the English farmer, as long 
as he was not subjected to any stress of competition, has 
suffered so much less hitherto than the Irish farmer, lies 
not in the superiority of his character, but in the polit- 
ical history of his country. I am not one of those who 
think it a wise thing that Ireland should be forever 



14 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

dwelling on past grievances — ever repeating the story of 
the persecutions she has undergone since the days of 
Queen Elizabeth ; not because these grievances have not 
been of the most terrible nature it is possible for the mind 
of man to conceive ; not because these persecutions have 
not almost cast in the shade all persecutions of Protes- 
tants by Roman Catholics ; not because Ireland's wrongs 
can ever be forgiven by Ireland, except on the sole con- 
dition of the full restoration of her national autonomy, 
but because it seems to me that there are enough griev- 
ances in the present to occupy our whole attention, and 
that to dwell on past injustices, to the exclusion of ex- 
isting ones, is to give the world cause to imagine that the 
memory of the past forms Ireland's whole stock-in-trade 
for her complaints, and that the roseate present is only 
marred by a spiteful brooding over events that the present 
generation of her English rulers are not to blame for, and 
have, as indeed they loudly assert, done everything they 
could to remedy. Such a view I have found readily 
adopted everywhere, and it is time that our Irish public 
men should cease to dilate on the crimes England com- 
mitted when she could plead semi-barbarism as her ex- 
cuse, and should instead bring before the notice of the 
world those she commits now that she claims to be wholly 
civilized. It is true that the word crime may seem strong 
when applied to those features of English rule which are 
at present most notable for their injustice, such as, to 
mention a few, the discrimination between Catholics and 
Protestants in the matter of higher education ; the ine- 
quality of the franchise between England and Ireland, 
whereby a large class of property holders who have votes 
in England are disfranchised in Ireland ; the corrupt and 
demoralizing government of "the Castle;" the dispro- 
portionately heavy taxation of Ireland, comparing its col- 
lective wealth with that of England and Scotland ; the im- 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 15 

mense military constabulary kept up all over the country, 
in addition to the garrisons of soldiers, so that last year 
there were three thousand more policemen in Ireland than 
there were criminals ; the system of packing juries and 
trying political cases by judges in the pay of the Crown, 
thereby causing the scandals so frequent in election 
times ; of members of Parliament, elected by immense 
majorities, being unseated on petition, in order to put in 
candidates supporting the Government ; and lastly, that 
which has above all things wrought the most evil in 
Ireland, the steady, remorseless, all-pervading system of 
postponing Catholics to Protestants, Celts to Saxons, the 
great bulk of the nation to a few hundred thousand col- 
onists from England, in order to keep up by artificial 
means the Protestant ascendency, which, left to the force 
of nature, would long ago have given up the ghost. This 
method of the English Government leavens the whole 
mass of society in Ireland ; wherever it is possible to pre- 
fer a Protestant to a Catholic, the preference is given, 
quite irrespective of any other considerations. Irish Cath- 
olics, in their own country, suffer at this day a kind of 
ostracism — political, civil, and social — the higher classes as 
well as the lower, in favor of a small number of men, se- 
cure in the possession of confiscated estates, and spending 
the money they draw from these estates in England, on 
the Continent, in America, anywhere and on anything 
but for the benefit of Ireland. As I said before, it may 
seem strong language to call these things crimes, but the 
effects they have j>roduced on the country are so terrible 
that a less harsh term would be inadequate to convey a 
sense of the reprobation which such abuses should ex- 
cite — which they would excite, were they not persistently 
glossed over by English writers and speakers, the only 
authorities on Irish questions that most persons think it 
necessary to consult. 



16 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

Not only the poverty, however, but the demoralization 
of the whole Irish people is due to these abuses, and to 
the many others which the fears of the English have from 
time to time compelled them to remove. Yet, though 
these latter have happily become matters of history, the 
evil they have done lives after them, and it is certainly 
not wonderful that a nation which up to the time of 
Gladstone's Land and Church Acts was nothing in the 
world but a nation of beggars starved by law, and of 
serfs enslaved by law, should not in nine years have de- 
veloped all the characteristics of self-reliance and dignity 
which, amongst more fortunate nations, are the slow 
growth of centuries of independence. Of course I do 
not for an instant admit that there is truth in the calum- 
nies hurled so recklessly at the heads of the Irish by peo- 
ple who are stirred up by political jealousy or by relig- 
ious bigotry. With the statistics of our country* show- 
ing year by year that it is freer from serious crime than 
any other country in the world, we can afford to smile at 
the charge so frequently made that we Irish are noted 
for our criminal propensities. In America, while the 
Irish are certainly somewhat prominent in minor offenses, 
committed usually under the influence of drink, a care- 
ful study of the police-court records does not show 
that the majority of murders and burglaries are commit- 
ted by the Irish. There is another nationality which 
holds a bad pre-eminence in America as regards all these 
graver offenses. The truth is, however, that when a crime 
is committed by an Irishman, special attention is at once 
drawn to it by all the newspaper organs of that party 
which does not happen to be supported by the Irish vote 
at the time, and the isolated offense is made the founda- 
tion of a sweeping indictment against the whole race. 

* See Dr. Hancock's Criminal Statistics for Great Britain. 



THE HOVELS OF IEELAND. 17 

This is done, not so much out of real antipathy to the 
Irish, but in order to discredit the party which is sus- 
tained by their vote. The Irish are not without blame in 
the matter, however. As long as, deluded by the lavish 
promises of office which are given before an election, 
promises which, it stands to reason, in nine hundred and 
ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, cannot be fulfilled, 
they vote stolidly and solidly for one political party, like 
a huge herd of sheep, they must expect that the other 
party, hopeless of gaining their support, will take no 
trouble either to conciliate them or do them justice, and 
will content itself with the small revenge of calling them 
names, while the party they do vote for, sure of being 
able to hoodwink them with promises when the time 
comes, regards them with that contempt which we all 
feel for creatures that we think we have just under our 
thumbs. A little independence on the part of the Irish 
voter would do more to raise his status in this country 
than the most immaculate behavior in points of morals. 
One party would no longer venture to revile him ; the 
other party could no longer afford to despise him. 

While saying thus much in defense of the Irish, 
against the wholesale accusations framed against them 
by Know-Nothings and by persons who take all their 
opinions from the newspapers — and I might say a great 
deal more, but this would not be the place for it — it is, 
unhappily, impossible to deny that the abnormal polit- 
ical system in Ireland has produced a deep demoraliza- 
tion of a kind from which a nation recovers far less easily 
than from a temporary epidemic of crime or immorality. 
England has at several periods passed through such epi- 
demics, and has recovered from them ; but in Ireland 
there is a national hebetude, a deadly stupor, pervading 
the whole country, which makes of every man a despond- 
ing Rip Van Winkle, and which, as in an individual, so 
2 



18 THE HOVELS OF ERELAND. 

in a nation, must at all hazards be put a stop to, or death 
will ensue. The absence of serious crime is attributable 
to the religious influences to which the people are sub- 
ject, but this deeper evil religion does not touch. Only 
those who have lived a long time in Ireland, and seen 
much, not only of the peasants and workingmen, but of 
the tradesmen, the merchants, the professional men, the 
literary men, and even the landed gentry themselves, can 
have an idea of the utter hopelessness, the utter indiffer- 
ence toward the future, the rooted despair which under- 
lie all the reckless jollity of the Irish manner. From the 
highest to the lowest one hears the same tale. There is 
nothing to be done in Ireland, no money to be made 
there, no chance of bettering one' s self or any one else. 
The Irish lawyer must needs go to the English bar to 
make money ; the Irish artist must sell his works in 
London ; the Irish capitalist invests his capital abroad, 
because there are no enterprises in Ireland to put it into ; 
the Irish tradesman drags along a painful hand-to-mouth 
existence, on the verge of bankruptcy all the time ; the 
Irish landlord spends his money everywhere except in 
his own country, because there is no society there brill- 
iant enough for his tastes, and because he likes to get 
away as far as possible from the sight of the misery 
around him, which disturbs his nerves, though it does 
not disturb his conscience ; the Irish farmer — well, we 
know what his condition is, and also what that of the 
day-laborer is, on a magnificent salary of from seven to 
ten shillings per week, and we know how the power of 
arbitrary rent-raising, in a community where the compe- 
tition for land is altogether abnormal, and not subject to 
the same checks as it is in other communities, has ren- 
dered the land-tiller spiritless and despairing, with no 
standard of comfort, no ambition to better himself, no 
desire to render more productive the ground he culti- 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 19 

vates, for that, in his case, would only mean increased 
rent as his reward. 

In judging of the effects of landlordism in Ireland 
there are two truths in political economy to be borne in 
mind. The first is, that the reason the evils of the land- 
lord system have not been felt acutely until recently in 
a country like England, is to be found in the fact that 
industry and enterprise of every sort, untrammeled by 
hostile legislation from aliens, have been so flourishing 
that no large class of the population has been at any time 
thrown on agriculture for its sole subsistence. There be- 
ing numberless gates open for the labor, the brains, or the 
money of an individual, no one would rent land unless he 
was sure of obtaining from it a rate of remuneration simi- 
lar to what he would obtain in any other employment for 
which he was fitted ; and having rented land, no one would 
invest money in improving it unless he was sure of a rate 
of profit equal to the general rate of profits to be obtained 
in other industries. This, of course, always acted as a 
natural check on the raising of rents, for if the landlord 
attempted to raise his rent beyond what the price of pro- 
duce and the cost of farming warranted, the tenant had 
but to throw up his farm and devote his labor or his 
capital to some other kind of business. Not, of course, 
that this was always easy, but it was always at least 
practicable, and the effect has been, as I have said, that 
until within the last few years the rents in England have 
been at no time exorbitantly high, and the farmer has 
therefore lived at peace with his landlord. Contrast 
with this the situation of the Irish farmer. A long series 
of iniquitous laws, which any one who chooses may make 
himself acquainted with in any history of Ireland, have 
crushed out the industries and manufactures of the coun- 
try, from its woolen and linen trades even down to its 
mining industries. It is true that most of the prohibi- 



20 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

tions placed on every branch of trade have been removed, 
but it will take many years of diligent fostering and lib- 
eral pecuniary aid from the Government, such as is be- 
stowed freely on Scotch industries, but which Ireland 
unfortunately does not seem likely to get, to repair the 
mischief which has been done. Even now, Ireland suf- 
fers from certain unreasonable prohibitions made in the 
interest of English revenues. The cultivation of tobacco, 
to which her soil and climate are peculiarly adapted, is 
forbidden by law, and, though it is also forbidden in 
England, as tobacco would not grow under any circum- 
stances in the latter country, this prohibition is no hard- 
ship to the English, while it cuts off a fruitful source 
of wealth in Ireland. The germinating of wheat is also 
forbidden to Irish farmers, and while the fear of illicit 
distilling is made the pretext, it is not forbidden to Eng- 
lish and Scotch farmers, amongst whom illicit distilling 
also prevails, especially amongst the latter. The jealousy 
of English manufacturers is ever on the alert, just as 
much as it was seventy or eighty years ago, to nip in the 
bud all Irish enterprises. If a factory is started in Ire- 
land, an English company at once steps in, buys it out, 
and then— quietly shuts it up. With the present small 
minority of Irish members in the House of Commons, 
systematically voted down by an immense majority of 
English and Scotch members leagued against them, there 
is always danger that the influence in Parliament would 
be sufficient to force through it some form of hostile legis- 
lation to crush any rising industry in Ireland that prom- 
ised well and excited the fears of English manufacturers. 
Ireland will never be safe from such legislation till she 
has her own parliament, and till then, the risk attending 
the investment of capital in Irish enterprises, both from 
the natural discontent and rebellious feeling in a country 
that is governed against its will, and held down in the 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 21 

position of a mere province when it ought to be a nation, 
and from the danger of this unfriendly legislation, will 
be too great to allow money to be drawn out which can 
be invested elsewhere with so much greater safety. 

From these causes, therefore, it results that the Irish 
tenant farmer, if he gives up his land, has nowhere to 
turn for a riving. He has had no means of acquiring 
a capital, and such few avenues of labor as exist are 
already choked up. Emigration and the poor-house are 
his alternatives ; what wonder if he sometimes resorts to 
assassination as a third alternative % It is true, agrarian 
murders have been very rare for the past nine years, 
showing that even such slight amelioration in the con- 
dition of the peasant as was effected by Gladstone's Land 
Act has made his patient nature still more patient and 
long-suffering. It is a fact, which every agrarian crime 
committed of late years proves, that, with the exception 
of some Ribbon outrages during the worst days of Rib- 
bonism, the Irish peasant does not assassinate save when 
driven to the direst extremity. Murder, of course, is 
never defensible, but there are ''extenuating circum- 
stances" in these agrarian murders which it is a duty to 
point out when they are made the basis of a sweeping 
attack on a whole people. 

I will quote here Professor Fawcett' s remarks on the 
subject of the Irish tenantry, or, as he justly calls them, 
cottiers, for the majority are only cottiers, i. <?., adopting 
his definition of the word, tenants possessing no capital. 
I refer the reader to the chapter on Metayers and Cottiers 
and economic aspects of tenant-right, in the " Manual of 
Political Economy. " Professor Fawcett' s object is to show 
how inferior the position of the Irish tenant is, both to 
that of the metayer tenant on the continent, and the 
rack-rent tenant in England. The italics are my own. 

"The cottier tenure," he says, "has existed on a far 



22 THE HOVELS OF IBELAND. 

more extended scale in Ireland than in any other country, 
for before the famine of 1848 nearly the whole of the 
land in Ireland was cultivated by cottiers, and even at 
the present time they occupy a very considerable portion 
of it. The cottiers of Ireland may be described as peas- 
ant cultivators ; for they rent the land directly from the 
landlord, and cultivate it by their own labor. The pro- 
duce of the land is therefore, as in the case of the meta- 
yer tenure, entirely divided between the landlord and the 
cultivator ; but there is a fundamental difference between 
the metayer and the cottier tenure. The rent which the 
metayer pays is definitely fixed by custom ; on the other 
hand, the rent which the cottier pays is entirely regulated 
by competition. Custom also generally gives to the me- 
tayer fixity of tenure, but no such fixity of tenure can 
be claimed by cottiers ; they compete against each other 
for the possession of a plot of land, and the landlord is 
only anxious to obtain those tenants who will give him 
the highest rents. Now the rack-rents, which are paid 
by the large capitalist farmers in England, are regulated 
by competition, and it may therefore be asked — can there 
be any essential difference between rack-rents and cot- 
tier rents % There is this essential and very important 
difference ; a rack-rent is determined by the competition 
of capitalists, whereas a cottier-rent is determined by 
the competition of laborers. The consequences of this 
distinction we will proceed to explain. When farmers 
apply large capitals, as in England, to cultivate their 
farms, they expect to obtain the ordinary rate of profit 
for their capital, and a reasonable remuneration for their 
labor of superintendence ; it is therefore quite impossi- 
ble that the rent paid by English farmers could long con- 
tinue so high as to prevent the ordinary rate of profit 
being received, for if this were so, capital would not 
continue to be invested in farming, but would inevit- 



THE HOVELS OP IEELAND. 23 

ably be applied in other employments, where the ordi- 
nary rate of profit could be secured. Back-rents, there- 
fore, are kept as it were in a position of stable equilib- 
rium by the competition of capital, for competition of 
capital signifies that men are eagerly anxious to invest 
their capital to the greatest possible advantage ; and con- 
sequently, a rack-rent is in this matter so adjusted that 
farming is neither much more nor much less profitable 
than any other occupation. In the case, however, of a 
cottier tenancy, it is population, and not capital, which 
competes for the land. The Irish cottiers, for instance, 
are miserably poor peasants, who possess no capital ex- 
cept one or two tools and the scanty furniture of their 
wretched hovels. When, therefore, they compete for a 
plot of land, it is absurd to suppose that they calculate 
the rent which they are willing to pay, by considering 
whether their capital would secure a higher rate of profit 
in some other investment ; they are themselves fit for no 
other employment, and all the capital they possess would 
scarcely realize more than a nominal sum. 

"To a cottier the possession of a plot of land is not a 
question of profit, but of subsistence, and consequently, 
in any district, the more numerous is the peasantry the 
more actively will the land be competed for. Tlie peas- 
antry of Ireland were so long accustomed to poverty 
that they were satisfied if they could occupy a plot of 
ground, and obtain from it just sufficient food to provide 
a bare subsistence ; they had no habitual standard of 
comfort ; every adult peasant married, and a want of 
food, with its consequent diseases, was the only check 
upon population. Such being the condition of the Irish 
peasantry, it may be naturally supposed that cottier 
rents were forced up to their highest possible point ; the 
cottier could only obtain just sufficient to live upon, and 
the whole remaining product was paid to the landlord as 



24 THE HOYELS OF IEELANB. 

rent. The pecuniary amount of these cottier rents may 
be regarded as merely nominal ; a peasant was so anxious 
to obtain a plot of ground that he cared not what rent he 
offered for it ; he well knew that the landlord, whatever 
was the nominal amount of rent, must leave him suffi- 
cient to live upon. And thus we learn, from the evi- 
dence taken before Lord Devon's Irish Poor Law Com- 
mission, that the nominal amount of many of these cot- 
tier rents exceeded the whole produce which the land 
yielded, even in the most favorable season. The cottier 
was consequently in constant arrears to his landlord ; 
the landlord had, of course, a legal right to distrain for 
the rent, but such remedy was of no value, for the whole 
property of the cottier was scarcely worth seizing. Nei- 
ther could the landlord gain much by resorting to eviction, 
for the evicted tenant would only be replaced by another 
tenant of the same character, whose arrears of rent would 
accumulate with similar rapidity. Although eviction 
was the legal right of the landlord, yet lie was restrained 
from exercising tlris right by the powerful motive of 
personal safety. Assassination not unfrequently pun- 
ished an evicting landlord. The economic condition of 
no other country has ever been so unsatisfactory as was 
the condition of Ireland under the cottier tenancy, for 
the cottiers, having taken the land at a rent which it was 
impossible for them to pay, had no motive whatever to 
be industrious. If by skill and labor the land was ren- 
dered more productive, the increased produce was ab- 
sorbed in the rent of the landlord. The rents were, in 
fact, fixed so high that whether the seasons were favor- 
able or not, whether the land was well or badly culti- 
vated, the cottier tenants could never expect to obtain 
for themselves any more than a bare subsistence ; hence 
it has been justly remarked, that the Irish cottiers were 
the only people in the world whose condition was so de- 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 25 

plorable that they gained nothing by being industrious. 
No scheme could possibly be devised which would act 
more effectually to impoverish the people, and throw the 
land into the most wretched state of cultivation. The 
progress of Ireland cannot be marked by a surer sign 
than by the gradual abolition of the cottier tenure." 

In this, on the whole, lucid and accurate description of 
the state of the Irish tenantry, Professor Fawcett makes, 
however, one or two mistakes which bear rather impor- 
tantly on the conclusions to be deduced from the account 
he gives. First, he speaks of all this as if a great deal of 
it belonged to the past alone ; but the fact is, the com- 
bined influences of the famine, the emigration to America, 
and Gladstone's Land Act have improved matters so 
little that everything is pretty much the same as it was 
before 1847, except that Ireland is now very much under- 
populated, in itself a great evil in any country, and that 
vast areas of land, formerly under cultivation, have fallen 
out of cultivation. It is a curious fact, and one only to 
be explained by the continuance of bad laws and of a 
hated foreign government, with the political unrest which 
the latter naturally produces, that the immense diminu- 
tion in the population since 1847 has neither had the 
effect of lessening to any appreciable extent the competi- 
tion in land, nor of raising, except very slightly, the 
wages of the working classes. The industries of Ireland, 
never very flourishing, have grown less and less so since 
the famine ; they have decreased with the decrease in the 
population, and, consequently, there being a diminished 
demand for labor, wages have not risen spite of the scarc- 
ity of laborers. The cottier tenure, moreover, exists 
still in all its worst features over by far the larger part of 
the country. The farmer is still, as a rule, one who cul- 
tivates the ground himself with the assistance of his fam- 
ily. Where the farms are larger in extent, he has, in 



26 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

the busy season, one or two miserably paid laborers under 
Mm, but the essential fact that makes him a cottier ten- 
ant remains undisturbed, viz., that he possesses little or 
no capital, and, as Fawcett shows so well above, never 
can possess it. Gladstone's Land Act, it is true, provides 
compensation for unexhausted improvements when the 
tenant is evicted, provided they were made not more 
than twenty years previously, but as I shall show by 
some remarkable cases that took place in Ireland about 
two years ago, that compensation is often entirely inade- 
quate and a mere mockery of the tenants ; it provides 
compensation for disturbance, except in case of eviction for 
non-payment of rent, and thus puts a direct premium on the 
practice of arbitrary rent-raising, for as soon as the ten- 
ant, by dint of hard labor, is beginning to obtain more than 
a mere subsistence of the most frugal kind from his land, 
the landlord at once steps in and raises the rent, and the 
refusal or the inability to pay — the tenant having per- 
haps contracted debts, which he expected to pay off 
from the increased produce of his ground — puts the ten- 
ant outside the pale of compensation. Were the land- 
lord deprived of the power of arbitrarily raising his rents, 
this provision in the Land Act would, of course, be per- 
fectly just ; as it is, it has caused more evictions than any 
amount of arrears of rents, and statistics unfortunately 
show that evictions have been steadily on the increase 
ever since the passing of the Land Act. Secondly, Mr. 
Fawcett makes an obvious error, natural perhaps to an 
Englishman, when he gives as one of the reasons why 
Irish peasants cannot resort to other means of obtaining 
a living, that " they are themselves fit for no other employ- 
ment. ' ' The truth is that, owing to the dreadful condition 
of the country ever since the union, there has been no 
other employment for them. The simple spectacle of the 
enormous labors executed by the hands of these same 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 27 

peasants in America — labors by which they have built up 
the country, and extended and established civilization 
everywhere on this immense continent — gives the lie to 
to this thoroughly English assertion. As pioneers, 
miners, masons, mechanics, artisans, engineers, trades- 
men, merchants, manufacturers, journalists, lawyers, 
physicians, orators, legislators, commanders of fleets and 
armies, governors of cities and states, and presidents, 
these despised Irish peasants and their offspring have 
shown for what employments they are fit, when they 
only " get a chance." 

Mr. Fawcett makes a third mistake when he says that 
the peasant " well knew that the landlord, whatever was 
the nominal amount of the rent, must leave him sufficient 
to live upon." Unhappily, what was and is too often 
left the tenant is just enough to die slowly on. Every 
year, numerous deaths, attributable to nothing but slow 
starvation and the ravages of diseases brought on by the 
want of food, clothing and fuel, attest the fact that the 
peasant frequently cannot get enough out of his land, 
after the rent is paid, even to live upon. The English 
and many of the American newspapers are shouting out 
communism ! incendiarism ! because a speaker at a ten- 
ant-right meeting in Ireland, a short time ago, advised 
the farmers to pay only to their landlords as rent, what 
was left after they had fed and clothed themselves. 
Surely, when one considers the kind of food and cloth- 
ing the Irish farmer is satisfied with, this would seem 
the most reasonable of propositions. But no ! unless the 
tenant submits to the pangs of slow starvation, in order 
to pay his landlord's rent, he is a communist and a rob- 
ber ! Is not this poor political economy, as well as poor 
Christianity? How can a nation be prosperous, when 
seven-tenths of it are starving? The laws of political 
economy promote the acquisition of wealth — how can 



28 THE HOYELS OF IBELAND. 

that be true political economy which promotes nothing 
but poverty? 

Professor Fawcett says also that the landlord could 
find no remedy for non-payment of rent either in dis- 
traint or eviction. These are the words of a man who 
has had little practical acquaintance with the "realities 
of Irish life." So far from the landlord getting no relief 
by eviction, it has always been his direct interest, if he 
finds his rents low, to raise them as quickly as possible 
to the point at which, as Fawcett says, " they exceeded 
the whole produce which the land yielded, even in the 
most favorable seasons." The tenant being then, of 
course, utterly unable to pay, even though he starved 
himself to death to do so, the landlord at once had his 
excuse for doing what he had been aiming at all along, 
namely, evicting his tenant, and turning the farm into a 
sheep or cattle-walk. This paid him a higher rate of inter- 
est than having tenants, before the competition of Amer- 
ican beef became so severe, and allowed him to dispense 
with the necessity of employing laborers, as he would 
have had to do had he undertaken to farm his land him- 
self. After the famine this spectacle was seen on every 
side, and soon bore bloody fruit in the shape of Bibbonism. 
Then at last the fear of assassination caused the landlords 
to pause, but not till after three millions of people had 
been " exterminated," and their places filled with cattle. 
It is true, the thing still goes on, and of late years it has 
increased, owing to the fact that Bibbonism has com- 
pletely died out, and agrarian outrages being very "few 
and far between," the landlords feel that they can evict 
with impunity. The wild spirit of revenge that blazed in 
the bosom of the Irish peasant in former less civilized days, 
has been quenched by advancing civilization and the ex- 
traordinarily rapid progress of education in Ireland dur- 
ing the last twenty years, but this check on evictions being 



THE HOVELS OF IEELAND. 29 

removed, it is all the more necessary that every form of 
legal coercion should be used in its place. Political agi- 
tation carried to its utmost constitutional extent, and the 
most unwearied efforts to awaken public opinion and the 
public conscience, are now more than ever necessary, or, 
spite of civilization, we can expect nothing but a relapse 
into the old barbarous methods of punishment inflicted 
on barbarous landlords. It is certain that if a few thou- 
sand landlords are to be allowed to evict and expatriate 
several millions of farmers, there must be some great 
radical blunder underlying the system which permits it, 
for " the greatest good of the greatest number" is one of 
the first principles of political economy, and here we 
have the law seeking, not the greatest good of the greatest 
number, but the greatest good of the smallest number, 
on true Conservative principles. ' ' For empires or for in- 
dividuals," says Carlyle, " there is but one class of men 
to be trembled at ; and that is the stupid class, the class 
that cannot see, who, alas ! are they mainly that will 
not see." And what if the stupid class be also the 
legislating class, the governing class, governing with 
regard alone for its own supposed interests, and a com- 
plete disregard for the good of the governed masses, with 
an ignorance that it does not care to correct, of what is 
necessary for that good, and with, to crown all, not 
merely an indifference, but a positive aversion toward 
those who are helpless under its rule, and who, in addi- 
tion to being in a lower class in life, belong to a despised 
nationality, and hold fast to a detested religion ? 

The second truth in political economy, which it is es- 
sential to keep in view when dealing with the Irish land 
question, is this most important one, which I find, strange 
to say, almost universally overlooked by the professed 
followers of Adam Smith. It is quite true that competi- 
tion in all branches of industry should be unrestricted 



30 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

by law, but only so long as free competition does not 
militate against the general good of the community. This 
principle is everywhere adopted by governments, and it 
is this which furnishes the excuse for protection — whether 
erroneously or not, it is not my object now to attempt to 
decide. Governments frequently conclude that it will be 
eventually for the benefit of the whole community if con- 
sumers are deprived for the time being of their undoubt- 
ed right to buy in the cheapest markets. No one will 
deny that if protection be really a benefit to the general 
public, governments are quite justified in setting up 
counteracting influences to the freedom of competition. 
Whether Protection be so or not is of course another 
matter. In like manner the rights of private individuals 
are curtailed, and they are deprived of portions of their 
property, with compensations that may or may not be 
sufficient, in order that works may be prosecuted, such 
as railroads and canals, which are for the public good. 
When there is a famine in a country it is considered quite 
justifiable on the part of the government to forbid the 
exportation of grain ; or when a war is contemplated 
which is supposed to be necessary, the exportation of 
ammunition and horses is forbidden. In innumerable 
cases are the rights property-holders and traders thus set 
aside, and no cry is raised of communism or of spoliation. 
The same rule applies with much greater force to prop- 
erty in land. Unlike other articles of merchandise, 
which are practically susceptible of infinite reproduction, 
land cannot be reproduced — not one inch, not one hair's- 
breadth can be added to it ; like the air we breathe, it 
cannot be manufactured, and to claim unlimited rights 
of private property in it is even more absurd than if 
some one were to try and set up a monopoly of a portion 
of the atmosphere, on the plea that he had bought it with 
his money ; for no matter how great the population of 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 31 

the world, the atmosphere is practically inexhaustible, 
and there will always be enough for every one to breathe 
— in the present geological era at any rate — but not so 
with land. There is not enough land to entitle any indi- 
vidual to exercise unrestricted powers over any single 
piece of it. Every person who attempts to do so is noth- 
ing more or less than a robber. The land everywhere is 
common property, and the individuals who hold it, hold 
it only in trust for the public. There can no more exist 
property in land than there can exist x>roperty in human 
beings, and he who pays his money for land pays it sim- 
ply for the privilege of holding it as a trust. To him 
belong absolutely the fruits of his labor and capital spent 
on the land, but nothing more, and if at any time it 
should be necessary, for the good of the community, to 
take his land from him, while paying him whatever com- 
pensation may be judged equitable, the government is 
not only justified in doing so, but is under an imperative 
obligation to do so, and if it does not, it is, in so far, a 
bad government. 

Of course any other kind of property may also be 
taken, but the arguments in favor of such a course are 
much more powerful in the case of land. M. de Laveleye, 
the celebrated Belgian economist, in elucidating his theory 
that every man has a natural right to possess property 
in land, and that, consequently, there can be no such 
thing as absolute property in land for any one, speaks 
thus:* "We occupy an island where we live on the 
fruits of our labor ; a shipwrecked person is cast on it. 
What is his right ? Can he say, invoking the unanimous 
opinion of writers on jurisprudence : ' You have occupied 
the land in virtue of your title as human beings, because 
property is the condition of liberty and of culture, a ne- 

*La Theorie de la Propriete. Chapitre XXVI. 



32 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

cessity of existence, a natural right; but I, also, am a 
human being ; I have also a natural right to maintain. I 
may therefore occupy, in virtue of the same title as you, 
a corner of this land, in order that I may live on it from 
my labor.' 

"If one does not admit that this claim is well founded, 
there is then nothing to do but to throw the shipwrecked 
man back into the sea, or, 'in justice,' says Mai thus, 'to 
leave to nature the task of ridding the earth of him, there 
having been no place laid for him on it.' 

"Certainly, if he has not the right to live from the 
fruits of his labor, he has still less right to live from the 
fruits of the labor of others, in virtue of a pretended right 
to assistance. Doubtless we can help him or give him a 
salaried employment, but this is an act of benevolence, it 
is not a juridical solution. If he cannot demand a por- 
tion of productive capital to live from by his labor, he 
has no rights at all. He who lets him die of hunger does 
not violate justice. Is it necessary to say that this solu- 
tion, which seems to be that of the official school of 
jurists and economists, is contrary to all innate senti- 
ments of justice, to natural law, to the primitive legis- 
lation of all peoples, and even to the principles of those 
who adopt it?" 

Thus far M. de Laveleye. And certainly it seems 
reasonable that if a man has no right to cultivate a por- 
tion of the earth that he may live — if this right can be 
arbitrarily taken away from him, that the land he culti- 
vates may be turned into a sheep-walk or a grouse pre- 
serve — then neither has he any right to receive state 
charity, and the government that taxes property -holders 
for poor-rates is committing a most outrageous piece of 
robbery. As Laveleye says, our only duty to the ship- 
wrecked man is to throw him back into the sea ; but this 
would be returning to the state of barbarism in which we 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 33 

see wild beasts, for cattle, acting on the principle that 
those amongst them which cannot take care of them- 
selves are useless and noxious, will horn to death a sick 
or wounded cow, and wolves will fall on and devour any 
one of their number that is injured. To follow the rules 
of the official school of political economists, therefore, 
man must go back to his primeval state, when he was 
without sense of right or wrong, and without religious 
feeling. I am not sure that the Sermon on the Mount 
would not prove a better guide to the professed aim of 
political economy, the greatest good of the greatest num- 
ber, than the doctrine that, as it is only the fittest who 
survive, people must prove their claim to being the fittest 
to live by leaving all who are weaker than themselves to 
perish. 

In Russia and Germany the principles formulated by 
Laveleye have been acted on, and in Russia the land has 
been partly, in Germany entirely, taken by the govern- 
ment from the great landed proprietors, and given to the 
tenants. In France the same process has been accom- 
plished by a revolution, and the landed proprietors have 
received no compensation. The French revolution re- 
mains as a terrible example and warning to all landlords 
for ages to come. It is useless to talk contemptuously 
of the ignorant masses, of a brute majority, etc. The 
brute majority will always end by getting what it wants, 
and is therefore by no means to be despised by a helpless 
and equally ignorant aristocracy. If the brute majority 
cannot get what it wants by the suffrage, then it will get 
it by revolution- You may talk with indignation of the 
•" low rabble" demanding as a right, what in your opin- 
ion they should only entreat as a boon. Nevertheless, 
if you, the educated upper classes, do not meet the rab- 
ble at least half-way in their demands, preposterous as 
they may seem to you, the rabble will overwhelm you at 
3 



34 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

last, and, strange to say, out of the ruins of your over- 
throw will rise up a new state of things, which succeed- 
ing generations may even consider a better one, just as 
the state of France, after the revolution, was in every 
respect superior to her state before the revolution. 

All through history, it is the mob (so called) that really 
ends by winning. In the warfare of plebeian against 
patrician, it is the plebeian that, though often crushed, 
invariably scores the final victory. The blind instinct 
of the multitude, pushing on ward, and upward, often 
wrong, but much of tener right, is one of the most power- 
ful of God's instruments of civilization for the world. 
It reminds the minority, which constitutes the upper 
classes, of what it would otherwise be only too glad to 
forget, that with the accidental privileges of greater edu- 
cation, greater intelligence, greater wealth, and so on, go 
stern duties, — that its wealth and its intelligence exist 
only in order to be employed for the good of those who 
are, accidentally also, less gifted with either one or the 
other ; finally, that if it neglects to perform its duties, if 
it begins to fancy that its gifts are to be used for its own 
good alone, the great threatening majority everywhere 
around it will inflict terrible punishment on it. Well 
has the mob been christened King Mob. It is trucu- 
lent and violent, like a raging torrent that has burst its 
bounds. At first it sweeps away everything it meets, but 
after a time, when its violence subsides, the earth is made 
all the more fertile and smiling for it. When the great 
conservative influence, which we may not inaptly christen 
King Log, has long been called upon in vain to reform 
an abuse, then King Mob rises in his might, and sweeps 
both the abuse and King Log away, and out of what 
seems universal wreck comes progress. 

But the rough justice of King Mob is a last and terrible 
remedy ; it is like the starvation cure in medicine, which 



THE HOVELS OF IBELAND. 35 

reduces a man to death's door in order to destroy as far 
as possible all the old diseased molecules of his body, and 
build him up a new and healthy body. Less tremendous- 
ly radical ways of regenerating the political system should 
be tried first, and it is to be hoped that as liberal ideas be- 
come more extended, and the upper classes more enlight- 
ened, recourse to this remedy by a people will become less 
and less frequent. In Ireland, where the people are slow 
to rise, rebellion, like Ribbonism, will, we trust, be soon a 
thing of the past. But for this desirable end it is not 
the education of the lower classes that is needed in Ire- 
land, but the education of the upper ones. Take two 
young men, both members of au Irish gentleman's family, 
send one to be educated in an English upper-class col- 
lege, the other in an Irish upper-class college. The one 
who is educated in England stands a fair chance of com- 
ing home with his mind full of liberal principles, while 
the one educated in the Irish college will almost certain- 
ly return imbued with the narrowest Toryism. To the 
ordinary hostility between rich and poor is added in Ire- 
land the animosity produced by the upper classes being 
of different blood and different religion, and by the long 
record of persecution and oppression which marks the 
relations between patrician and plebeian there for centu- 
ries past. With this intense narrow-mindedness on the 
part of the upper classes, and an intense sense of wrong 
on the part of the lower classes, it may seem difficult to 
see how rebellion is to be avoided for the future. In- 
deed, it may yet be that the unnatural bond between 
England and Ireland is to be severed by the sword, but 
until the chances of success are very great, it would seem 
that it is the duty of every lover of Ireland to try and 
prevent abortive risings, which bring each time untold 
misery upon the country. Vigorous constitutional agi- 
tation against abuses is perhaps the best method that can 



36 THE HOVELS OF IEELAND. 

be devised for keeping in check the fierce passions of 
the populace. Where this is interdicted, the smouldering 
fire of disaffection is always ready to leap into flames. 
In agitation it finds a safety-valve. The Irish are a 
patient race, and if their hopes can only be fully aroused 
that there is really a prospect of good to be obtained 
from constitutional action, they will be ready to give it a 
fair chance, and await results. Still, the words of O'Con- 
nor Power, member of Parliament for Mayo, were preg- 
nant with meaning when he said, while addressing a mon- 
ster tenant-right meeting, "It is better for the govern- 
ment to give way to the pressure of agitation, than to 
give way to the pressure of rebellion." To one or other 
of these forms of pressure every government in the 
world has always had eventually to yield, for we know 
the familiar axiom, and especially in Ireland have we 
realized its truth, that every government will be as bad 
as it dares be. 

There is a story in the Scandinavian which tells how a 
certain king, named Frothi, once bade his two slaves 
grind him gold. They ground on and on for many years, 
giving him huge piles of treasure. At last they grew 
weary, and begged for rest. But the king was greedy, 
and bade them grind on. So, weary as they were, they 
continued to grind, till at last, instead of gold, an army 
of men poured out from the quern. These fell upon 
King Frothi and slew him. 

* * * * # # j sa j^ t j iat j intended to show by 
some cases which took place not over two years ago, 
that the provision in Gladstone's Land Act for compen- 
sation for unexhausted improvements made not more 
than twenty years previously, is frequently quite futile. 
I will proceed to cite, in proof of this assertion, certain 
proceedings in a famous suit for libel, brought against a 
Mr. Sarsfield Casey, for censures made by him on the 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 37 

conduct of an individual named Buckley, a land specu- 
lator, who had bought up from a land company a large 
property, called the Mitchelstown Estate, the greater 
part of which consisted of mountain and bog land, which 
had been entirely reclaimed by the tenants, without any 
assistance whatever from landlords. The work of re- 
clamation had been a long and very difficult one, and 
had extended over several generations, during which the 
holdings had been handed down from father to son. 
The rents, as fixed by the last landlord who held 
the estate before it passed into the hands of the land 
company, were low, compared to what fertile land fetches 
in Ireland, but not at all low when compared to the 
real value of the land, which, spite of the fifty or sixty 
years' labors of reclamation spent on it, was still very 
barren, and not susceptible of being made more pro- 
ductive. It was such land as in England a farmer would 
pay a merely nominal rent for, and the rents actually 
paid for which in Ireland only left the tenant the usual 
bare subsistence, with which the Irish farmer is com- 
pelled to be satisfied. Any higher rent meant starvation 
or the work-house. On entering into possession of this 
estate, Mr. Buckley, who had bought it cheap from the 
land company, determined to get twelve or fifteen per 
cent, interest for his money, and sent down a person 
already notorious in such congenial tasks, named Patten 
Bridge, a former henchman of the infamous bankrupt, 
James Sadleir, to revalue the land, with the assistance 
of another "bird of a feather," named Walker. Patten 
Bridge's instructions were to raise the rents as high 
as possible in every case, and in valuing the land, 
only to take into account in the tenant' s favor such im- 
provements as had been made inside of five years pre- 
viously ! All other improvements were to be made the 
basis of a rise in rents. Of course, this was pure confis- 



38 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

cation, and so Mr. Sarsfield Casey said. Bridge and 
Walker succeeded entirely to their own satisfaction, 
and the rents of the Mitchelstown tenantry, already 
poor and miserable to a frightful degree, from the fact 
that their former rents, low as they were, left them noth- 
ing that they could save over for years of bad harvests, 
were raised all round from fifty to five hundred per cent. 
On the tenants declaring their inability to pay, notices 
to quit were served on them. Here it will be seen how 
Gladstone's Land Act failed to compensate the tenants 
for the improvements which had been made both by 
them and their ancestors. To use the expression of the 
Dublin Nation, the land had virtually been created by 
the tenants ; the improvements extended backward for 
nearly a century, and as they comprised the entire re- 
clamation of the land, were still unexhausted, and never 
could be exhausted as long as the soil was kept under 
cultivation at all. The principle of compensation for 
unexhausted improvements made within twenty years 
before, was here clearly absurd. For the rest of the hard- 
ship and injustice attending this case, I will let some of 
the evidence given at the libel trial speak for itself. The 
report of the proceedings I have taken from the Dublin 
Nation of the 8th Dec, 1877, which, in its turn, quotes 
from the Daily Express, the Freeman' s Journal, the Irish 
Times, etc., papers of various shades of politics. 

Michael Regan, a comfortably clad man, but worn 
looking, in reply to Mr. Porter, deposed that he, and his 
father before him, had held 47 Irish acres of mountain 
land on the estate. They reclaimed it without help from 
the landlord. They had to blast rocks with gunpowder, 
and bury big stones, remove others, and get rid of the 
heather. There was a house on the holding which his 
father built, and rebuilt another. They got a little tim- 
ber for one house from Mr. Brogden, who was formerly 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 39 

agent. When there was no road, limestone had to be car- 
ried up in panniers on the horse' s back. Some of the 
land was now fair enough, other parts of it were hard and 
rocky. Very bad black oats grew on the holding. His 
family consisted of himself, his wife, and ten children. 
They had potatoes, bad or good, stirabout,* and " every- 
thing that came next to hand that they could get." The 
old rent was £5 195. 6d. It had been raised to £15 165. 
6d. He never agreed to pay it, because he was afraid he 
could not, and he told that to Mr. Bridge and to Mr. 
Buckley. He was under notice to quit now. Cross-ex- 
amined by Mr. Heron. — He had a quarter of an acre of 
turnips last year, and an acre of bad meadow. He had 
six cows and six yearling heifers, and three calves. The 
yearling heifers were very small and bad. 

Pat Kelly, examined by Mr. Roche, deposed — I have a 
farm at Kiltankan, containing 19i Irish acres. I have 
been on the farm since I was born, and I am 55 years of 
age. 

What sort of land was it when you first knew it % — A 
bad sort of land, as it is now. Half of it is in marsh, 
and the rest is poor, dry land. The nine acres or so are 
very wet. I have got oats out of the land, and potatoes 
we set, but we seldom have any potatoes. I only recol- 
lect twice in twenty years having had enough. I have 
three cows. The whole yield of butter is about four 
firkins. I have seven children. When Walker came I 
had a conversation with him. I brought him a letter 
from a neighboring parson, asking him to consider the 
poorness of the place, and not to raise the rent. 

What conversation had you with Mr. Walker \ — Well, 
I said, I supposed it was to raise the rent he was there, 



* Equivalent to mush, made of an inferior kind of oatmeal, or of yellow 
Indian meal. 



40 THE HOVELS OF IEELAKD. 

inasmuch as he came without my sending for him. All 
he said was, why should it not be raised, because the 
times were better now than some former times. 

What did you say \ — I said, sure it was easier for my 
father to pay the present rent than it was for me, and he 
asked me to show was it easier for my father to pay the 
rent in his day than it would be for me. I said the rise 
in labor now, and the want of fuel, and want of provis- 
ions, with me, were things that he had not to contend 
with at all, and that I had, and that was more than a 
match for the increase of a few firkins of butter. I said 
if he raised the rent, what would I do for the children. 

What did he say to that \— He said, " Why did we get 
them?" 

What did you say to that % — I said it was a question 
against nature. I am getting into debt every year. 

The Lord Chief -Justice. — You are getting worse and 
worse, Mr. Roche. Do you work hard % — I do, myself 
and the children. 

And yet you are getting into debt \ — I am. 

What was your old rent 3— £12 8s. Qd. 

What is the new rent ?— £20 10s. 

Is the farm worth the increased rent \ — I am not sure 
to be able to pay the old rent at present prices and sup- 
port my family. I cannot for the new rent and live on 
that farm. 

Have you been served with notice to quit? — I have, 
with three of them, at different times. I got the first two 
or three years ago, and the second some time after that. 

Has there been an ejectment on these notices to quit \ 
—No. 

Did it expire in September just passed % — Yes, I would 
rather leave than pay the increase. 

Cross-examined by Sergeant Armstrong. — My rent was 
never £20 Is. 6d. I own part of a house at Mitchels- 



THE HOTELS OE IRELAND. 41 

town, which I got through the death of a friend. I have 
laid out money on it, and I have given orders to an auc- 
tioneer to sell it, as I cannot keep it. I have a tenant in 
it ; he is paying £16 a year. I laid money out lately on 
it to the extent of £30, but there is a mortgage on it. I 
have seven or eight hens, and some pigs. I get £3 4s. or 
£3 5s. per firkin for butter. I have four heifers, twenty 
bonnives, no store pigs, three sows, 1} acres of oats, about 
two acres of potatoes, and live or six acres of meadowing. 
I never use fowls for myself, or anything else that is 
good. 

Re-examined. — I am hopelessly in debt, and I cannot 
get out of it. 

Denis Murphy, a tall, gaunt man, who gesticulated ex- 
citedly when giving his evidence, was next called and 
examined by Mr. Butt. 

Are you a tenant on Mr. Buckley's estate ? — I am. 

How much land do you hold I — Mr. Bridge told me I 
held lOf acres. 

What old rent did you pay ? — At the time that the 
Land Company bought this property from the Right 
Hon. the Earl of Kingston, we were in unity and peace. 

What rent did you pay to the company \ — The com- 
pany' s agent, my lord, which was Mr. Langford Rea, 
Esquire, came in the year 1854, my lord, and gave me 
and my partner notices to quit. Well, that was a thun- 
derbolt to me, because to the Right Hon. George, Earl of 
Kingston, I or my father never was one farthing in debt. 

Well, what rent did he make you pay % — Because 1 
was not able to stand law with him I submitted, and said 
he might take my case into his sympathy and humanity. 

Just answer my questions, and then I will ask the 
Lord Chief Justice to let you say something for yourself. 
What did you pay to the Land Company ?— £3 Is. 6d. 
per year. 



42 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

Has Mr. Bridge asked you to pay more 1 — goodness 
me, sir, he broke my neck and my back. 

What rent is he asking from you? — £6 155., double 
£3 7s. 6d, and must be paid, or the crowbar will be ap- 
plied to the corner stone and level it, and leave me like a 
raven in the world. 

Have you paid the increased rent? — Ah sure, God 
help me, I have, and neglected myself in every form, 
through food and raiment. 

What effect has the payment of that increased rent 
had \ You said something about your raiment and food \ 
— I will tell you that. 

Tell it quietly. — That when this rent w r as doubled upon 
me I knew the result, and I pawned my body coat, a 
frieze coat, my lord, in order to be up to the rent, and 
there it went from that day until this from me, in the 
year 1874, and I never saw it since. 

You have never been able since to get your coat out of 
pawn \ — No, sir ; because when the term fixed by the 
pawm-office was passed, it w T as sold. 

Was it to pay the increased rent that you pawned 
your coat ? — It was just as I told you ; I am on my oath. 

Could you have paid that increased rent without pawn- 
ing your coat % — I could not, unless I mortgaged the 
land. 

How many have you in family ? — I have my wife, and 
I had nine children. There are three of my children in 
America. When they saw this charge made upon me, 
they said that when they were in their youthful bloom, 
they would never suffer such destitution, and they ad- 
vised me to go to America. But after the hardships and 
destitution to myself and my brother and my father, 
who is in the grave, bringing the limestone in a basket 
on his back, I would not. And there is not a man, niy 
lord, in the world that is able to describe mountain land 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 43 

like a man who toils on it, neither a Walker nor a Bridge, 
and it is a scrupulous thing, my lord, that any gentle- 
man of decent appearance should see hungry and naked 
creatures (with great energy) because, my lord, I am as 
healthy as any man in the court-house, and my visage 
can show I am starving for want of food. 

Since you agreed to pay that increased rent, have you 
yourself had sufficient food % — Upon my oath, I had 
nothing but Indian meal stirabout, and I would be very 
g]ad to subsist upon Swedish turnips, which it was never 
decreed by Almighty God a human creature should sub- 
sist on. After eating a bellyful of it, I would not be 
able to go ten perches through weakness. 

Have your family been living on the same ? — In part 
they have, and not as much as I have, because many is 
the journey and the toil and the hardship that I should 
go ; but still and all my food was insipid and weak. 

Do you mean to tell me that was the ordinary subsist- 
ence of your family for the last three years ? — Indeed it 
was. 

Had you ever a meal of meat \ — Musha, God help me 
and my meat ! I did not ; I did not eat it at the last fes- 
tival ; that was in September. It is a doleful thing to 
tell you, I did not taste a bit of meat, because I had not 
money to buy it. 

Has your wife been at service ? — When I was put to 
this difficulty — surrounded, my lord — I said, " Well, af- 
ter my father's sweat and my own, God is good," said I, 
" and now," said I, "you may go for a year in service, 
in order that we may keep it, sooner than be turned away 
into the work-house, and while you are able to work, you 
can get better food there than in this farm." She con- 
descended, my lord, to my advice, and went into service. 

Is she at service now? — She is at home in her own 
cabin. 



44 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

What kind of a house have you % how many rooms ? 
— None but the one. 

Is the roof a good one ?— It is, but the thatch is wretched, 
and reed is too dear, and my land don't grow corn.* 

Is your land high up on the mountain ?— Oh then, it is 
so high and the cliffs and glens getting into it, that if 
you stayed in it and looked down, " Niagara megrims" 
would come into your head, and you would fall down. 

You are a good way up the mountain \ — Oh, I am too 
far up. 

You remember when your father took this land \ — No. 

How long do you remember it % — I remember it since 
the year 1821. 

In what state was the land %— Oh, dear knows ; with 
the exception of two fields he reclaimed, I saw heath 
that grew up to my knees. 

I suppose you heard from your father who reclaimed 
the two fields % — It was himself ; there is not a house or 
a home there, only just as there is on Mount Ararat. 

Will you tell me how you reclaimed that land % — To go 
to the limestone quarry that was on the lowland, and to 
fill, my lord, a little donkey car ; to fill about six crot ; 
to drive on till we began to get against the steep hill ; to 
unload a portion of it until we got to another cliff ; to 
unload a portion again, and in the long run you would 
not know what color was the horse, only white, like the 
day he was foaled, with sweat ; and upon my oath, 
there would not be more than one crot, when it reached 
the kiln, to reclaim this barren mountain. We had noth- 
ing but a spade and a pickaxe, and we had to get powder 
to blast the rocks. I would be willing to forfeit the ten 
acres and three quarters for the gentlemen of the jury to 
see the place I am living in. 

* By " corn " is meant wheat. 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 45 

Are there stones there ?— Upon my oath, man, there 
are— stones bigger than the bench the Chief Justice is 
sitting on. 

How did you do with the rocks ? — A crowbar should 
raise them, and a stout man with an iron sledge in his 
hand, and the greatest bully of a man had enough to do 
to make quarters of three big rocks in a day, and indeed, 
my lord, it was not on Indian meal stirabout he could 
do it. 

After having removed the stones, what did you do 
with the heath \ — To dig it with a spade and turn it into 
the ground, to come then with the quick-lime burnt in 
the kiln, and to shake a little dust of that on it. Well, 
then, with a quantity of little manure, by pulling some 
heath, and laying it opposite the door of the barn, and 
then spreading it over the ground, * * * * * and 
so help me God, if you dug a sod of that stuff, and were 
strong enough to throw it over this great building, where 
it would fall it would be as stiff as when you cut it out 
of the farm. 

How long should you work \ — Dear knows, from the 
rising of the sun till the going down. * * * * * 

Did you get any assistance from the landlord % — No, 
no more than you did. 

Or from the company % — Ah, nonsense, no more than 
we got from God and our own industry. 

You were not able to give it as much lime as it re- 
quired ? — Yes, that is it. 

You say that your three children went to America ? — 
Steered to America. 

Was that in consequence of your condition by being 
made to pay the increased rent \ — Sure it was, unless they 
went about the country with their spades on their shoul- 
ders, and now I ask you, who would give them hire % 

Were you going to America yourself at the time \— JNo, 



46 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

nor I Avon' t to-day. I would sooner die where I am to- 
day. If I had the courage of a man, it would be better 
for me ; but now, when I am worn down, let me sink or 
swim. I have no chance now, while G-od leaves me the 
life **#***.* 

Eight tenants were next examined in succession. Jo- 
hanna Fitzgerald, a poorly-clad woman with a child in her 
arms, swore she was not able to pay the old rent which 
had been raised from £2 14s. 4d. to £4 4s. She had no 
money to buy a drop of milk for her children, when leav- 
ing on the previous morning. 

Patrick Burke deposed that he had got only one frieze 
coat for fifteen years, and that he had to pawn for 4s. ; 
he was not able to pay even the old rent, in consequence 
of which he ran into debt. Terence Murphy swore that 
he and his father reclaimed his holding ; he was not able 
to pay the increased rent ; he had always to buy food ; 
he had often sown oats which did not ripen at all. He 
had got a "red" ticket for medical relief. Thomas 
Kearney said his potatoes were no potatoes at all, for 
" they would fly out of his hands when he came to peel 
them," and he and his family had to live on yellow meal 
stirabout for nine months in the year. It was so cold on 
the mountain side that oats would not ripen, and was all 
chaff. He had not thrashed oats for twelve years ; he 
had to cut it green and throw it to the cows. He could 
not pay his new rent, which was £17 10s., the old being £5 
14s. 6d. John Duggan was working at the reclamation 
of the farm when he was not nine years old ; drained his 
garden for seven years to prepare it for a crop ; remem- 
bered the former agent of the property attempted to re- 
claim it and failed ; had his rent raised from £2 lis. 8d. 
to £6 16s. ; he could not pay the old rent but for his 
father, who was in a foreign country. Patrick Kearney 
said when long ago he tilled a streak of his farm, " there 



THE HOVELS OF IKELAND. 47 

was a heap of stones the height of yourself, some of them 
three tons' weight, large and small ;" almost a bridge was 
made across the glen, such a heap of stones was thrown 
out ; the potatoes were so bad this year they were hardly 
worth digging ; goats in other places were as good as the 
cows we had ; he could hardly pay his old rent, £1 8s., 
not to talk of the new rent, £3 3s. 6d. James Maguire 
swore he got his farm, wild mountain, covered with stones 
and heather. Darby Naish said his father broke his 
heart reclaiming his holding ; he paid the new rent (hav- 
ing got 25s. reduction), rather than be thrown out or put 
into the work-house. 

The next witness was Mr. Rearden, President of the 
Cork Farmers' Club. He was examined by Mr. Butt, 
Q. C. — I live about eight miles from the City of Cork, and 
have a good deal of land. I know a good deal about it. 
I am President of the Cork Farmers' Club. 

I believe you were asked to visit the property of Mr. 
Buckley ? — Yes, I did visit it. 

Were you accompanied by any other person ? — Yes, by 
Mr. O' Flaherty of Limerick, Mr. Byrne of Wallstown 
Castle, and some other gentlemen. 

Where did you go to on Mr. Buckley' s estate 1 — I went up 
to Skeheenarinka first, and took some notes of what I saw. 

The Lord Chief Justice. — Is that recently? 

Witness. — Not much more than a week ago. 

Could you form a judgment how far Skeheenarinka is 
above the sea ?— I don't know how many feet, but it is a 
rather high mountain. Some of Skeheenarinka is high 
up on the mountain, and some down below. I went up 
the hill first, and then right across. 

As to the general character of the land, say what it 
appeared to you to be ? — A pure mountain, almost worth- 
less in my estimation for any agricultural purposes, with- 
out expending an immense lot of money on it. 



48 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

Is it generally cultivated ?— Attempts have been made 
at cultivating a considerable portion of it, and it is culti- 
vated, some of it. 

What was the state of that cultivation, as you 
saw it?— There were patches of potato field and some 
stubble. 

Had you sufficient opportunity for judging of that soil ? 
— Yes, we dug up some of it repeatedly. 

What was the nature of that soil generally where you 
saw the patches of cultivation ?— The surface appeared a 
little dark, but down lower it was a wretchedly bad sub- 
soil, that required a good deal of time and care to bring 
it fit for growing any crop that would pay ; it had been 
manured, of course. 

How deep was the upper soil ? — About six inches in 
some places, and more in other places, and in other places 
hardly anything at all. 

And what was the subsoil generally? — Coarse sand, 
and in other places a tough marl. 

What value for the purpose of agriculture would you 
set on such as you saw there ? — I would not set any value 
on it ; I think Is. an acre would be as much as it would 
be worth. I don' t mean the low portion or the foot of 
the mountain. 

The Lord Chief Justice. — What would you say was the 
value of that which had been reclaimed ? — I would set 
very little value on that, although considerable capital 
had been expended on it in the way of labor. 2s. an acre 
would be quite enough for it, in my opinion. 

Mr. Butt. — Lower down, was the land a little better? 
—Yes. 

What kind of soil was there lower down ? — It was not 
so stony, and better in every way. 

Did you inquire from the tenants what the old rents 
were ?— I did. 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 49 

Assuming that they told you truly, was the old rent 
the value of it ? — Quite enough in my estimate. 

Examination continued. — I inquired from about twenty 
tenants. I only saw four or five cattle there. I never 
saw tenants that had less cattle, except one farm that 
had twelve cows on it, which we did not visit. I only 
saw six cows on our journey across Skeheenarinka, and 
they were miserable small things. The land would never 
feed good cattle. 

Did you observe the character of the houses of the 
people % — I did ; they were the most miserable buildings 
I ever saw. They were hardly fit to call them even houses 
itself. I saw some built of mud, but whether of mud or 
of stone, they were of the same bad character. 

Will you give a description of the interior of any one 
house you examined ? — The second house that I went 
into, the woman was examined on the table here yester- 
day — Johanna Fitzgerald. There was a wretched earthen 
floor on it, with water oozing down from the walls through 
the bad thatch, and a couple of beds at the end of a dark, 
dingy room, and there was not a single bit of a blanket, 
but some filthy canvas. You would go up to your ankles 
almost in the damp earthen floor. 

Were you in a house where you found a man ill of 
pleurisy ? — Yes, that was on Barnahoun. There was a 
house of another widow there, and it was just as bad a 
house. The rain was coming down in twenty parts, and 
the walls quite black with the oozing of the rain from the 
rotten thatch., I went into fifteen or sixteen houses on 
Skeheenarinka. 

And generally they were all in as bad a condition 
as these two houses ? — The most of them were all bad, 
but three or four particularly bad. If they were down 
in the neighborhood of Cork, where I live, the reliev- 
ing officer or the sanitary officer would come there 
4 



50 THE HOYELS OF IRELAND. 

and immediately order the people to go out of them. 
* * .* I examined Mrs. Rock's holding. Her hus- 
band died. She had three children, and she showed 
me some oats that grew there. They were no good. She 
had seven acres, and three acres of it tilled. 18s. was 
the old rent. The new rent, she told me, was £2 4s. 

Now as to Lawrence Carroll % — I went into that house ; 
he has live children. Himself and his son work for Mr. 
Bridge, and there was not a worse house in Skeheena- 
rinka than that. 

Was that house fit for human habitation \ — No. 

Was it fit for the habitation of a beast %— It was not. 
You would not put a beast into it. A cow would be just 
as well off outside. 

What state was it in % — Dropping rain down every- 
where ; holes in the roof, and the floor of it muddy and 
filthy ; sticks propping up the roof in every direction. 

Did you see any bedding in the house \ — I did ; an 
apology for clothing. It was old sacks and rags of every 
description. In fact, it was hard to tell what they 
were. 

Witness then referred to the house of Richard Leon- 
ard, who, he was told, was sick in bed. The door was 
shut. It was a little house about six feet high, without 
a single window in any part of it. Examined the farm 
of Thomas Leonard sufficiently to say that the old rent 
of £2 6s. 6d. was quite enough for it. He said the same 
of the farm of James O'Neil, whose rent was increased 
from 28s. to £2 16s.; Terence Murphy from £3 7s. 6d. 
to £6 15,9. * * * 

Generally speaking, going over Skeheenarinka, where- 
ever you did ascertain the old rents, did you think that 
rent a fair one, as between landlord and tenant ? — I did. 

Generally, from your observation of the tenants on 
Skeheenarinka, were they in a thriving and prosperous 



THE HOVELS OP IRELAND. 51 

condition ? — No, they were all very badly off. They had 
neither cows nor horses. 

In what condition did the tenants in Barnahonn appear 
to be 1 — Worse than at the other place ; if possible the 
houses were worse. 

Tell me some of the houses that struck you most par- 
ticularly. — There was the house of a farmer named J. 
Creagh. There were ten children in this house, and the 
father was ill of pleurisy ; and I never saw any house 
yet (and I have seen bad houses of every type since the 
famine years) — I never saw anything to compare with 
this house. There were at least a dozen holes in the 
roof, and there were as many pools of water on the floor. 
The roof was, in fact, worse in the bedroom than in the 
kitchen. The father was sitting squatted over a few 
little clods of turf. 

Did you see a bed in the house ? — I did ; it was a hand- 
ful of rags. (Witness recognized as a correct repre- 
sentation of the house a photograph that was handed 
in.) 

I suppose you don't think that was a very good place 
for a man to recover from a pleurisy ? — I think it was a 
shame and a disgrace to have people inside that house at 
all. I noticed also the house of David Hennessy, who 
had five children, and whose rent was raised from £2 
to £4 5s. There were two rooms, one a small bedroom, 
which answered as a dairy and a bedroom. This room 
was about 11 feet by 9. 

Was that house fit for habitation % — It was better than 
other houses that I saw. I went to another house of a 
man named Carey, and as soon as I got inside I was near 
being thrown down. I stepped into a huge pool of water 
— it was so dark I did not see it. There was a dam made 
across inside to keep the water from extinguishing the 
fire. I observed the roof, and if it is not down since it 



52 THE HOVELS OF IKELAN3X 

must have been additionally propped. It was propped 
in every direction, and the chimney all cracked. 

How many were living in it ? — I did not see father or 
mother ; we met a bailiff there near the door. 

What was the bailiff doing % — He was dogging us all 
about that townland. We could not see some of the 
tenants to get any information from them. 

Do you see that man in court \ — There he is (pointing 
to a bailiff who stood behind Mr. Brady). 

Did he go before you into some of these houses \ — He 
did. 

And were you denied admittance to some of the houses 
where he had been before you \ — We were not denied 
admittance, but the people would rather we would not 
come in, evidently. 

Was the appearance of the tenantry that of well-fed, 
prosperous people, or the contrary % — They had a starved 
emaciated appearance in almost every place that we went 
to. 

Did you see anybody that looked well fed % — I believe 
the bailiff was the best fed man I saw on the estate. 

Mr. O' Flaherty was examined, and his evidence cor- 
roborated that of the previous witness in every jjarticular. 

Dr. W. F. Fenton, dispensary doctor at Clogheen, de- 
posed that a good many of the tenants received from him 
medical relief. Edmund Dorney, a tenant, swore his 
wife died in the work-house, and that he had been there 
himself when he fell ill. He paid the new rent through 
fear of having to go there again. A statement to the 
same effect was made by Richard Condon, who also said 
that out of an acre of oats he got only a stoneweight of 
grain. James Phelan said he was twenty years building 
his house, "and," said he, at the close of his examin- 
ation, " if I was talking for a month I could not explain 
my hardship and my misery." Mr. J. Byrne, J. P., 



THE HOVELS OF XBELAND. 53 

President of the Mallow Farmers' Club, corroborated the 
evidence of Messrs. O' Flaherty and Rearden. 

We extract the following passages from his evidence as 
reported in the Freeman : 

Yon had an opportunity of seeing the unreclaimed land 
in its original state, and the reclaimed \ — I had. 

What value would you put upon expended in reclaim- 
ing that land % — £20 the Irish acre, at least. 

I ought to have asked you before, but I believe you are 
yourself an extensive farmer % — Yes ; I hold 500 acres. 

If you were now to set about bringing that unreclaimed 
land into the state of the reclaimed, do you think it 
would cost you £20 an acre X — I do. 

Now as to the reclaimed land, taking it just as it is, if 
you were letting it fairly, as between landlord and ten- 
ant, in its present condition — I don't want you to take 
tenant's improvements into account — but if it were free 
of everything, what value would you put upon it ? — From 
5s. to 6s. an acre. 

Generally, now, on that townland, did you make any 
remark about the general appearance of the people living 
on it ? — They seemed to be a very broken-hearted people, 
I heard nothing there but wails and lamentations. 

I was asking you about their personal appearance. — 
They were all a very wretched-looking lot of people, 
apparently very badly fed, and badly clothed and cared 
for. 

I believe that you went to a townland called Glenna- 
curry, and saw Thomas Carey' s house there ? — I did. He 
has one of the best-looking houses in that neighborhood. 
Did you come upon them while they were at dinner I — 
We did. They were preparing a lot of Indian meal stir- 
about for dinner. 

Did you see any turnips there ? — I saw, on the newly 
reclaimed portion of the land, what they intended to be 



54 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

a crop of turnips, and I suppose a hundred acres of the 
turnips I saw would not be worth Qd., I should fancy. I 
don't know how to put any value at all upon them. 
They were a complete failure. They hardly budded out 
at all. 

What was the character of this land before it was re- 
claimed ? — I saw portions of it in process of reclamation. 
A hundred loads of stones would have to be taken off 
each acre of land that was to be reclaimed — several hun- 
dred loads. I saw him reclaiming a portion of it. 

How thick were the stones?— So thick that you could 
see no soil between them, just like a regular heap of 
stones. 

What would it cost to reclaim an acre of that ground % 
—I should say £30. 

Did you, in any of these townlands, examine the depth 
of the soil? — Yes; we dug sods in several fields. In 
Cooladerry there were from eight to ten inches of soil. 

In Skeheenarinka what was the deepest ? — In the unre- 
claimed portion there was nothing that I could call soil, 
only a desert ; but in the reclaimed portion there were 
four or live inches of soil. 

Taking the pasture you saw there, if one head of cattle 
was put on the pasture, do you think it would improve 
£5 in the year ? — I know well it would not. 

How much would it improve? — Perhaps the half of 
that. 

What cattle would each acre of that reclaimed pasture 
feed ? — I should say it would take, six or seven acres to 
feed a dairy cow winter and summer. 

The Lord Chief- Justice. — Is that your evidence : six or 
seven acres of the reclaimed portion? Witness. — Yes, 
my lord. 

Mr. Butt. — I suppose it is not good pasture ? — Yery 
bad. 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 55 

Cross-examination failed to break down any of the evi- 
dence, which I have given somewhat in extenso (omitting, 
however, an immense deal of corroborative evidence). I 
close the pitiful details with a sense of relief. I have 
given them because most Americans read no Irish papers 
and few English ones, and their knowledge of Irish affairs 
is taken wholly from the frequently mendacious cables 
which are sent from London to the American newspapers. 
The state of things described at this trial is only a sample 
of what exists, more or less, all over Ireland, and of which 
I have myself frequently been an eye-witness. Brought 
up amongst Anglo-Irish Tories, as I had been, and with 
my mind filled with the bluest Tory principles, nothing 
less than the constant spectacle of tyranny and cold- 
blooded heart! essness on one side, and of suffering and 
degradation on the other, to which it was impossible to 
blind myself, which would not be thrust aside for all my 
prejudices of education, would have sufficed to arouse me 
gradually to a true view of how the case stood between 
landlord and tenant, between rich and poor, between 
Protestant and Catholic, in Ireland. Many and many a 
time has my blood boiled with an indignation all the fiercer 
because it was impotent, at the wrongs I have seen done 
around me by educated gentlemen and ladies, who looked 
upon the peasants that had been delivered over helpless 
into their hands, as so many brute beasts, to be made 
slaves of or exterminated. A landlord could not indeed 
flog his tenants to death in Ireland (though I have myself 
seen brutal blows inflicted on some cowering, half-clad 
wretch, by the man who virtually owned him, body and 
soul), but, with this exception, our Irish peasantry have 
been no whit better off than the negro slaves in Cuba and 
America. The landlord belonged to the conquering race, 
and the laws of the country to which the conquering race 
belonged gave the landlord, and still give him, every 



56 THE HOVELS OF IEELAND. 

power over his tenant short of direct murder, istot short 
of indirect murder. Any one who says that I exaggerate 
in thus writing, either has never lived in Ireland, or has 
allowed his eyes to be closed by class prejudice. It 
needs but to draw the contrast between the Irishman on 
American soil, standing up erect in an independence 
which sometimes becomes aggressive, and the Irishman 
at home, shivering with his hat off in a pouring rain, with 
downcast look and submissive speech before his tyrant, 
as I have seen him over and over again, till my heart has 
sickened at it, to see how the manhood has been crushed 
out of him by his long slavery to want. 

The ablest authorities have came to the conclusion that 
there is but one remedy for this special form of Ireland's 
misery. It is the establishment of a peasant proprietary. 
Sfcein and Hardenberg considered that it was the only 
remedy for a similar state of things in Germany, and time 
has shown how right they were. When Gladstone's 
Land Act was passed, it was thought that what are called 
the Bright clauses in it, providing for the extension of 
government aid to those tenants who wished to buy their 
land, would gradually lead to the establishment of a 
large body of peasant proprietors, similar to the English 
yeomanry of former times, all over the country. Unfor- 
tunately these clauses have turned out a delusion and a 
snare. Landlords, following their old traditions, prefer 
selling their estates to one person, rather than to many. 
Some time ago, a large estate called the Harene estate, 
was put up for sale, and the tenants, who happened to 
be a little more comfortably off than usual, made a bid 
for it, exceeding by £15,000 any previous bid. Instead 
of accepting their bid, however, the trustee, for reasons 
best known to himself, handed over the estate to a land 
speculator, with whom he had made a private bargain, at 
a lower price than that offered by the tenants. The lat- 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 57 

ter, thinking the law was on their side, and anxious to 
escape the danger threatened them by falling into the 
hands of a greedy speculator, who, they knew, would in- 
evitably repeat in their case the performances of Mr. 
Buckley and Mr. Bridge on the Mitchelstown estate, 
brought a lawsuit to compel the trustee to give them the 
estate, as being the highest bidders. The case was at 
first decided in their favor ; this decision was reversed by 
the Irish Court of Appeals, and the matter being finally 
carried before the House of Lords, the decision of the 
Court of Appeals was confirmed, and the tenantry, in 
addition, mulcted in heavy costs. It may seem strange 
that a man should go to so much trouble in order to get 
a smaller sum of money for a property than he could 
otherwise have done, but it shows just what the preju- 
dice against splitting up an estate will do. In this case, 
however, the private bargain between the trustee and the 
speculator, the details of which did not appear, must be 
taken into consideration. It shows that, owing to one 
cause or another, the Bright clauses in the Land Act should 
have been made compulsory on the landlord or trustee, oth- 
er things being equal, in order to do any good. As things 
stand, these clauses are altogether ineffectual, and some 
far more radical reformation in the land system will be 
the only one that the peasantry will now be satisfied with. 
Their determination is shown by the attitude of passive 
resistance that they have taken upon the rent question. 
It is in fact the only attitude they can take up with any 
hope of benefit to themselves, and one of its secondary 
good results will be, that there will be far less bloodshed 
produced by it than by any other methods the Irish 
peasantry have in their desperation adopted in former 
times of distress. Were the times more prosperous, 
or were the raising of cattle in Ireland still as lucra- 
tive as it used to be, the refusal of the tenants to pay 



58 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

exorbitant rents would of course be followed! by whole- 
sale evictions. That method cannot now be adopted 
by the landlords. It no longer pays to raise cattle in 
Ireland, and the landlords will get more by accepting 
the reduced rents the tenants have offered to pay, than 
by depopulating their estates, as they did in the good 
old times. Evictions, therefore, the great source of blood- 
shed hitherto, will be fewer than they ever were, and 
the landlords, met by this stone wall of passive opposi- 
tion, and being in a sense at the mercy of their tenants — 
relatively, that is, to other happier years for landlords- 
will be forced to yield. But, as many of them have 
their estates so heavily encumbered by their own or their 
parents' extravagance that they cannot pay the fixed 
charges on their property if they take the reduced rent, 
these landlords will be eager to sell. It will no longer be 
considered a desirable thing to be a landlord. And here 
comes in the first ray of light that points to the way to 
Ireland's salvation. The landlord interest rules, and is 
likely to rule for many years yet, in the House of Com- 
mons. In a year or two the landlords will see that their 
best interest lies in selling their land to the Government. 
Once this truth has become firmly impressed on the land- 
lord brain, it will be but a short step to passing a bill 
through Parliament for raising a loan to buy up the land 
in Ireland. Such a loan could be raised with the greatest 
ease. The purchase of the whole of Ireland would cost 
but little more than two or three of those little wars 
which England so delights in. The money could be ad- 
vanced to the tenants at four per cent., and interest and 
installments would be cheerfully paid, for though the 
greatest pinching and saving might be necessary for a 
few years, there is no pinching that would not seem easy 
and delightful to the peasant, spurred on by the hope of 
becoming a proprietor. 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 59 

I have not sketched too roseate a prospect. Some years 
ago some of the lands of the Irish Chnrch were sold by 
the Government to the tenants occupying them, whereby 
four thousand farmers were made proprietors in future, 
and through the misery and hardship of the last three 
years, these tenants have all readily paid their interest 
and their installments. They have an object to pinch 
and suffer for. The tenant-at-will has none. 

Fixity of tenure, at fair rents settled by arbitration, 
was a favorite scheme with that able statesman, Dr. 
Isaac Butt, and a bill to that effect has been brought 
forward by the Irish members year after year in Parlia- 
ment. It has this much to be said for it (and that is a 
great deal), that such a system, while by no means crush- 
ing the evil of land monopoly, or providing a radical 
remedy for the destitution in Ireland, might still enable 
an increased number of farmers to lay by something 
every year, and thus constitute the nucleus for a fund 
which might, after many years, put them in some sort of 
position to purchase their holdings. The very slow and 
gradual improvement it might cause, combined with the 
disgust of the landlords at finding their power so much 
curtailed, and their consequent increased willingness to 
part with their estates, would probably operate so as to 
bring about finally the establishment of a peasant pro- 
prietary ; but the process would take too long. We need 
a remedy that works more quickly than this— need it not 
only because the tenants are miserable, though this is 
in itself a sufficient reason, for if one important section 
of a community is sick, the community itself cannot be 
in a healthy state, but because the condition of the 
whole nation imperatively requires it. Every single man, 
woman, and child in a country is vitally interested in 
the question as to whether the laws of that country are 
such as allow the soil to be cultivated in the most pro- 



60 THE HOVELS OF IKELAND. 

ductive manner. The great game preserves and private 
parks of the aristocracy are directly injurious to every 
man, woman, and child in the land, for they cut off so 
much soil that should be used in producing food or raw 
material for manufactures. The immense quantity of 
waste lands are directly injurious for the same reason? 
and so long as the laws are such as to render it unprofita- 
ble to the farmer to reclaim these lands, by not securing 
to him the fruits of his industry, so long will those lands 
not be reclaimed, for the Irish landlords themselves make 
no attempts at reclamation. Again, so long as the high- 
est incentive to industry, the magic influence of proprie- 
torship, is withdrawn from the cultivator, so long will 
the ground not be cultivated in the best way, nor with 
the greatest painstaking; so long, therefore, will it be 
less productive than it ought to be. All these conditions 
are found in their most aggravated forms in Ireland, and 
as they keep the farming or laboring classes, the great 
buying classes, in poverty, so do they necessarily hurt 
and impoverish all the other producing classes. The 
farmer who can make no profits from his farm, and who 
has no standard of comfort, and the laborer to whom he 
pays starvation wages, are both unable to buy from the 
manufacturer, and manufactures of all kinds decline. 
There is no market for anything, prices fall, and we see 
what has been the scandal of the last few years, landlords 
raising their rents in the face of a continued fall in the 
price of agricultural produce. As, however, the tenants 
cannot go on paying these rents, the general poverty 
soon reacts on the landlords also, and hence the shrieks 
of the landlord class, now heard from one end to the 
other of Ireland. All, therefore, inevitably become poor 
together, and as there is no road to improvement open, 
the depression grows worse and worse, till some such 
crisis as a famine, by causing tremendous mortality and 



THE HOVELS OF IEELAND. 61 

wholesale emigration, depopulates the country, and ap- 
parently makes things a little better for the survivors. 
Such a momentary gleam, however, is unreal, being 
founded on what can never be anything but a misfortune 
to any country, viz., depopulation. The politico-econom- 
ical quacks of the present day prescribe emigration in 
much the same way as the medical quacks used to pre- 
scribe blood-letting. It is of course possible that there 
may be a plethora of population in a country, though 
China is about the only nation in which we see an ap- 
parent plethora, and that would seem to be chiefly the 
effect of the Chinese government's refusal to develop 
the internal resources of the country ; but in the whole 
history of Ireland there never has been any excess of 
population. 8,000,000 of inhabitants has been her high- 
est total, while, if the land were properly cultivated, and 
if manufacturing industries were flourishing, she could 
support with ease from 15,000,000 to 20,000,000. Mean- 
while emigration, like blood-letting, produces an appar- 
ent temporary improvement, soon followed by a worse 
state of things than ever. The nation, as its life-blood 
oozes slowly away from it, becomes exhausted and de- 
spairing. Only one thing remains alive forever, and that 
is the spirit of hatred and rebellion. 

Nevertheless, the prospect before Ireland, though dark, 
is not hopeless. The remedies for her ills are well known ; 
the first and most pressing one needed is the abolition of 
landlordism. On every side the indications point to a 
speedier attainment of this goal than is generally sup- 
posed. The landlords themselves know it, and while 
what they professed to dread is tenant-right, what they 
dread in their hearts is a far more sweeping change. 
This dread, however, will not always exist in their minds. 
The day will come when they mil be only too glad to 
take a fair compensation for their lands, and go. If they 



62 THE HOVELS OF IKELAND. 

quit the country on which they have lived — the majority 
of them — as parasites, the country will not miss them, 
but if they should decide to remain, it will be perforce 
as better citizens than before, for with the breaking up 
of the landlord power in Ireland* the ascendancy of the 
English colony there will also be broken up, and as a 
secondary, but necessary consequence, the greater part 
of the power of the English government for evil. The 
representation of Ireland in the Imperial Parliament may 
still continue inadequate, Ireland having now only 105 
members in a Parliament of 658, though her population 
is one fifth that of England and Scotland ; an immense 
number of property holders may still remain disfran- 
chised, owing to the refusal of the English to concede to 
Ireland the household franchise they themselves enjoy ; 
the Government may still withhold the endowments for 
education which it owes as a simple debt to the Catholics 
whom England so long kept by law in ignorance and pov- 
erty. Home Rule may still be a work for years of painful 
labor to accomplish, but the corner stone of English sov- 
ereignty in Ireland will have been removed, and. if the 
rest of the edifice follows in due time, it will certainly 
not involve Ireland in ruin. When that time comes, Ire- 
land will be able to say to England, "I was once your 
dupe, your victim and your slave ; you said we were 
united, but we were united as the prisoner is to the wall 
to which he is chained : I am now your equal, and there- 
fore I can forgive past wrongs, and be your friend." 
Till Ireland can say this, there is no friendship possible 
between her and England ; no union by coercion between 
two nations can ever be anything but a delusion. 

One word before I finish I would say to America. I 
would ask her to remember the words of Benjamin Frank- 
lin: "I found the people of Ireland disposed to be 
friends of America, in which I endeavored to confirm 



THE HOVELS OF IBELAND. 63 

them, with the expectation that our growing weight might 
in time be thrown into their scale, and justice be ob- 
tained for them likewise." Franklin was wiser in his 
generation than the Know-Nothings and toadies of Eng- 
land of the present day. I have heard many Americans 
say, " Yes, we used to sympathize with Ireland, but since 
we have had a rebellion of our own, and suppressed it, 
we have no longer any sympathy with rebelliously in- 
clined people." It would seem almost superfluous to 
point out to any person of intelligence the radical differ- 
ence between the rebellion of the South against the cen- 
tral government of the United States, and the rebellions 
of Ireland against England. Without entering at all into 
the question of the merits of America's civil war, it 
should yet be remembered, that the South endeavored to 
secede from a Union into which it had voluntarily en- 
tered, and to shake off an authority which it had itself 
helped to establish, and which it had always, up to that 
time, recognized. At no period of her history, on the 
other hand, did Ireland voluntarily unite herself with 
England. She was conquered by force of arms, and the 
English power is to this day kept up by a large military 
garrison. The consent of the people themselves was never 
asked to any union, and to this day the members re- 
turned by Ireland to the Imperial Parliament are out- 
voted in everything, and can only obtain the most trifling 
concessions by a system of the most determined obstruc- 
tion. It is thus evident that there is no analogy what- 
ever between the Southern rebel and the Irish one. 
The Southerners fought against their own government as 
the Puritans did in the time of Charles the First, and as 
the American colonists did in 1776 ; the Irish fought 
against a foreign government, imposed on them by force. 
The real fact is, however, that America is now so far 
away from her own days of suffering and feebleness, her 



64 THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 

own bitter struggle against oppression has become so 
much a mere matter of ancient history with her, that she 
has forgotten how sweet sympathy seemed to her in those 
days. Not in those days did she scornfully reject friendly 
and sympathetic addresses from other nations, at the bid- 
ding of the English ambassador. Rebellion seemed right- 
eous enough to her then, though it was against her own 
mother country. Then she was grateful for the boon 
of a few kind words. Irishmen led her armies to the 
field, fulminated against England in her legislative as- 
semblies, and affixed their names to her Declaration 
of Independence. But the splendid republican heat 
of those days has cooled down. Patriotic Americans 
are not ashamed to wish out loud for a monarchy and 
an aristocracy. There is a class growing up, which 
if it could only constitute itself into a titled nobility, 
would throw overboard every republican principle that 
their forefathers have inscribed with their blood on 
the pages of American history. It may yet turn out 
that it is not hoodlums, greenbackers, or communists 
that will be the worst enemies of the republic, but 
those who ought to be its bulwarks— the respectable and 
monied classes. Not Butler, or Kearney, or Justus Schwab 
are the dangerous men to this republic, but the people 
who think themselves too good for a republic at all. 
The ever increasing sharpness of class distinctions, and 
the pretensions of the so-called "old families" in a 
country only two hundred years old, on the one hand, — 
with those of the wealthy shoddies on the other — these 
two classes, each trying to conjure themselves into an 
aristocracy, to the exclusion of the only people who 
should, in a republic, be entitled to pre-eminence of po- 
sition — the people of the best conduct and highest intel- 
ligence — these things are signs that America has entered 
on a new stage in the history of her development. She 
is passing through a period of involution instead of evo- 



THE HOVELS OF IRELAND. 65 

lution. But such involution can only be temporary ; pro- 
gress is eternal, and in a great nation like this, the inev- 
itable reaction against monarchical and oligarchical ideas 
will one day set in, and America will return to her first 
love. Communism and Feudalism, these two extremes 
that seem so opposed to each other, yet, in reality, call 
each other into existence, will die out together, as twin 
relics of barbarism. 

Meanwhile to the men and women who form the back- 
bone of this country — those who cling to the stern old 
political faith of Milton and Hampden, of Patrick Henry 
and George Washington— I appeal for sympathy for my 
prostrate country. To them I look for right judgment 
and for cheering words to the men who are conducting 
our life and death struggle inside and outside the walls 
of Westminster. Words are but little to ask, but words 
from a power like America resound all over the world, 
and can plead, trumpet- tongued, for a down- trodden 
cause. Many a time when I have read churlish words 
of ridicule or abuse written against us by an Ameri- 
can pen, I have said, And thou too, Brutus \ Eng- 
land exults when she sees the nation, which from its 
history should be our greatest friend, stand in the ranks 
of those who rail at us. One of these days, however, our 
long agony will be ended. We shall be a free and pros- 
perous nation, for on the road on which we have set our 
feet, we shall not turn back. Bloodlessly, we trust and 
believe, but in some way or other we mean to wrest our 
national autonomy from the grasp of the robber. Doubt- 
less we shall then have sympathy and friendship "ga- 
lore" extended to us, but our gratitude and our love 
will be to those who have spoken kindly things to us 
now, or who have even abstained from reviling us. It 
will be an opportunity for nobleness lost to the greatest 
nation that has ever existed, if it refuses us now the 
easy favor of a little charitable speech. 
5 



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One of the most interesting and instructive works ever 
published on the History of Ireland. 



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OF 




IRISHMEN 



A Gallery of Heroic, Literary, Artistic and Scientific Irishmen, presenting to the 

reader vivid portraitures of Ireland's noblest and most remarkable Warriors, 

Statesmen, Patriots, Orators, Lawyers, Historians, Philosophers, Poets, 

Dramatists, Novelists, Painters, Sculptors, Actors, Musicians, 

Architects, Engineers, Explorers, &c, &c. 



By THOMAS CLARKE LUBY, A.B.T.C.D. 

The main and primary idea of this striking and most interesting work, is 
the selection of those representative Irishmen, whose careers may be said to 
embody and impersonate, as it were, all the constancy and heroism of Ireland's 
unparalleled resistance to foreign domination. The reader of these lives, 
without being obliged to wade through the tedious and uninteresting portions 
of Irish history, will have unfolded to his view a series of life-like pictures of 
Ireland's glorious struggles, against fearful odds, for her freedom ; of all the 
principal periods and critical turning-points of Irish story ; while, in addition to 
the achievements of the men of action, the work will give entertaining and 
instructive biographies of those intellectual giants — literary, artistic and scien- 
tific—who have vindicated the intellectual claims of Ireland's sons, in every 
age, from that of Brian Boroimhe down to the most recent times. 



CONDITIONS OF PUBLICATION. 

The work will be completed in about Twenty-four Parts, at Fifty Cents 
each. 

Each Part will contain Sixty-four pages of Letter-press. There will ha 
Two Engravings in every Part, Forty-eight in all, Portraits, Battle Scenes and 
Places of Note. 



THOMAS KELLY. 17 Barclay Street, New York. 



What are Ireland's grievances? Is there any just and substantial cause 
for the Irish people's chronic discontent and hostility towards English rule? 
What really is "the Irish problem," and what interest should America take 
in its solution? These questions are exhaustively answered in 

A New and Brilliant Work, entitled 

IRELAND: 

AS SHE IS; AS SHE HAS BujEN, AND AS 
SHE OUGHT TO BE. 

(WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS.) 



By 



JAMES J. OLANOY. 

Formerly Editor of the Irish World. 



IRELAND AS SHE IS. 

In the First Part is given a clear and comprehensive analysis of Ireland's 
actual condition. Separate chapters deal with such suggestive topics as ' ' Law 
and Order," "The Land," "Industrial Stagnation," "Depopulation and 
Famine," "Religious Inequality," "Education," "Taxation," "Political and 
Social Debasement," &c. — all leading irresistibly to the conclusion, that Ireland's 
material and intellectual resources are systematically plundered, wasted, and 
paralyzed, under a monstrous mockery of Law. 

IRELAND AS SHE HAS BEEN. 

Part Second is a scholarly and luminous review of Irish history down to 
our own day, which bids fair to become a popular classic. This part is a closely 
knit succession of graphic pictures, sketched in vivid yet truthful colors, and 
presenting the story of Ireland's struggles, achievements, and sufferings with 
panoramic distinctness. 

IRELAND AS SHE OUGHT TO BE. 

Part Third is a cogent summing-up, written from the standpoint of a 
Nationalist. The author indulges in no vague "hysterical" denunciation ; a 
chain of iron logic runs through every page of his work, and everywhere 
welded firmly to it is the lesson that London legislation and Irish prosperity 
are forever irreconcilable. Admirers of the British Empire will, doubtless, 
dissent from this conclusion, but few of them will dare grapple with the over- 
whelming evidence on which it is based. 

WHO SHOULD BJEAI) THIS BOOK? 

Every American citizen, whatever his lineage or antecedents, who cares to 
know the truth about the Irish race, should read it. 

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the enslavement of his cradle-land, should read it. 

Everybody who desires to speak or write on any phase of Ireland's condi- 
tion or history, will find in it a veritable storehouse of information, easily 
accessible by means of an exhaustive index. 

8vo. 332 pages. Price, paper, 50c; cloth, $1 .00. 



THOMAS KELLY. 17 Barclay Street, New York. 



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